So you can navigate to all your favorite folders and run those old DOS commands with ease.
So to change to the Program Files folder, you’d type: To get around the problem, when you change directories using DOS commands at the prompt put the folder name in quotation marks. All those tildes can get extremely confusing, especially if you have multiple folders that are similar. For example, to open the file C:\Users\mylogin\Resume.docx, the command would be. To open an existing word document from command prompt. The above commands work with all editions of MS Word and Office. When you attempt to switch to the Program Files folder, you see PROGRA~1 because it truncates long filenames to the old fashioned short file names. However, we can use the below command to open Word application from command prompt. There was no Program Files folder, for example because it’s longer than the 8.3 character restriction and has a space in it.Ī vestige of this limitation remains in the Command Prompt. One thing that was different in the bad old DOS days was that you couldn’t use long file names with spaces in them. Recently, I just ran across a tip that I may have known about before, but forgot. Okay, that’s just one example of the utility that still exists in the realm of DOS. The directory listing is redirected to a file called myfilelist.txt and you can open it in any text editor or word processor.
Navigate to the folder that you want to list and at the prompt, type DIR > myfilelist.txt. I know someone will ask, so to recap, open the Command Prompt. For example, as I’ve written before, if you need to create a text list of the files contained in a folder, the easiest way to get it is by saving the contents to a file using the big, bad old DOS directory (DIR) command. Those of us who have been using computers for a long time still find that some things are more easily done from the Command Prompt (formerly known as the DOS Prompt).