Syntax of shell\command\open values - %1 vs %l vs %L

Question

one of the programs I'm developing at work is reading the registry to figure out how to open files that it is given from another application (we didn't use ShellExecute because we need to process id, and I failed to look at ShellExecuteEx closely enough to see that it gives the process handle, and it's too late now, anyway). It already works, so this is more for my own edification, but does anyone know why some of the entries use %l or %L instead of %1? At least for "%l" it could be a typo, but "%L" seems unlikely. In fact, Media Player uses "%L" in the open commands for various audio files. I'm fairly sure it means the same thing as %1, if only because I can't think of anything else it could be.

My current favorite theory is that it's a joke about how l and 1 are easy to confuse. Or it could stand for "location", but that would be lame :)

Answer 1

On some old systems (Win95, WinNT4), using %1 may give the short path, using %L always gives the Long path...