Comment by ammmir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ammmir | Hacker News Reader

I never used LANMAN, but the spec makes for some interesting reading...

> NOTE: Due to a temporary restriction in CMD.EXE, it is not possible to use the DIR command on a UNC pathname, as in DIR \ \BIGSERVE\ANYNAME. This will be fixed in a future release. The DosFindFirst API call will accept UNC pathnames.

I always wondered about this... apparently the restriction carried over to the Windows port and was never fixed... maybe they didn't want to bloat cmd.exe with needing to "NET USE" UNC paths behind the scenes? Who knows!

tip - if you want to cd into a UNC path, you can't; but you can pushd into one and it'll create a temporary drive letter mapping and unmap it when you popd out

Where were you and your helpful tips 30 years ago when such knowledge would have been actually handy? :-) Cool tip, though.

But dir does support UNC paths in cmd on windows, doesn't it?

I’m pretty sure dir \\server\share has worked in cmd.exe since os2 1.1

Can't `cd` into it though, making it somewhat useless.

It's time to drop cmd and use powershell, cd is an alias of set-location which handles this fine:

    PS C:\>cd \\server\share
    PS Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\FileSystem::\\server\share>

I have no need for windows in over a decade.

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