Finding the Recycle Bin on a local NTFS drive

windows winapi filesystems ntfs recycle-bin
DougN picture DougN · Jun 1, 2009 · Viewed 7.8k times · Source

I'm trying to write some simple code that will return the directory for the recycle bin on a local drive. Seems like it would be simple -- should be a thousand answers on Google. Haven't found one yet :(

I HAVE found that FAT and NTFS drives have different base names (RECYCLED and RECYCLER). I've found that 'the' recycle bin is a virtual folder that combines the recycle bins of all drives on the machine.

What I haven't found is a way to find C: drive's recycle bin directory -- even on a Vietnamese (or any other non-English) machine. (No posts I can find indicate whether "RECYCLER" gets internationalized or not)

Can anyone point me to a definitive answer?

Thanks

UPDATE: Aware of CSIDL_BITBUCKET and the functions that use it. From everything I've read though, it points to a virtual directory which is the union of all deleted files by that user on all drives. Looking for the physical recycle bin directory (on my Vista it appears to be C:\$Recycle.Bin as far as I can tell)

Answer

John Topley picture John Topley · Jun 2, 2009

Raymond Chen has the answer - How can I tell that a directory is really a recycle bin?

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