How To Retrieve an Icon for a File Class Without a File

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To do this, select the SHGFI_USEFILEATTRIBUTES flag and FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL so that the API assumes that the file exists and it will not try to look for it on disk.

For example, to find the icon associated with ".zip" files the call would look like:

   SHFILEINFO sfi;
   HIMAGELIST hil;

   ZeroMemory(&sfi,sizeof(sfi));
   hil = SHGetFileInfo(".zip",
                       FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL,
                       &sfi,
                       sizeof(sfi),
                       SHGFI_USEFILEATTRIBUTES|SHGFI_ICON);

   // hil now contains the handle to the system image list
   // containing the large icon images.
   // sfi.hIcon contains the large icon for the file.