Been working on this script of mine fora couple weeks now, and came across this interesting little trick that might or might not be well known, but since I don't see it posted anywhere, I figured I'd share it.
Basically, i'm writing a shortcut manager, because having over 100 shortcuts on your desktop is annoying, but a lot of these are steam shortcuts, which are .url files, not .lnk files. I'm not 100% sure if this will work for every .url file, as I saw posted somewhere they're not all the same, but it seemed to work just fine for the ones I tried it on (namely, created from Steam).
I found that .url files internal structure is strangely similar to a MS INI file (.ini), so I decided to try using IniRead to extract the string, and what do you know, it freaking worked =O.
IniRead,ExtractedURL,BioShock Infinite.url,InternetShortcut,URL ;Steam generated BioShock Infinite desktop shortcut
Now, I haven't actually put this to any practical use yet, because I'm still working on other script components for my manager, but I figured this would be fun to share. the Ini* commands are more useful than I give them credit for. As long as the file follows the usual INI structure [Section] Key=value, Ini* commands will get along nicely with them.