Re: Stupid Windows Tricks

start notepad.exe and start c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe are NOT the same thing.

What happens if you try and run start c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe from a CMD prompt?
Does it run or fail as well?

Don't *assume* c:\windows is the place to run things from - on our machines we
deliberately place the OS on a different drive to C and never in a \windows or \winnt
directory - amazing how many nasties this catches out.

On Thu, 25 May 2006 17:14:44 -0500, R D Avant <extralarge23@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi, all.

This is a strange thing, peripherally related to Clipper / DOS.

A client had his ISP come in and replace his network hub with a router,
which - of course - resulted in the loss of all his drive and printer
mappings. We've got those all working again, but there is one very
peculiar problem involving the "start" command used for running windows
progams from batch files.

Somehow, the "start" command has been disabled... but only in the batch
file used to start the Clipper app.

That is, we can go to a DOS prompt, and hamd-enter the identical line,
and in that case, it works. But from the BATch file, the result is the old
"bad command or file name" line used these many years in place of the
equally informative "huh?". And it IS start that's not working, because we
can replace the actual line with "start notepad", and it does the same
thing (in the batch file). In case the PATH had gotten hosed, we put in
the entire path name, ie, "start c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe" and got
the same "bad command or filename".

Any ideas?
John.
.

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