I’ll admit, this one does seem a little basic. However, it’s something that’s often struck me as odd, yet I’d never bothered to look into further until this week, when my curiosity got the better of me.
In Windows, as in Linux, it’s really easy to change directories when in a command prompt. Say you’re in C:\Users\User, and you want to change to C:\Users\User\Desktop, you would put in the following:
cd Desktop
If you wanted to switch to C:Windows\System32, you would put in the following:
cd C:\Windows\System32
Simple, right? So, if you store files on another drive (as I always do, because it makes backups and sharing much easier for me), and you want to switch to, say, D:\Websites\Website\, you would put in the following:
cd D:\Websites\Website
The trouble is, it doesn’t work. I would always have to do the following:
D:\ cd Websites\Website
Until now, I’d never been bothered enough to look at what i need to do to make it work. It turns out, when switching drive letters as well as directories, you need to use a switch, /D. so, to do it in one line, you need the following:
cd /D D:\Websites\Website
To be honest, I can’t really see any reason why you would need a switch, since nothing happens at all if you don’t use it, but I’m sure someone, somewhere, will know why it’s implemented like that. Although come to think of it, I’ve never really understood why Windows still uses drive letters, as the Linux model of folders relative to root seems much more logical to me!