[MS-DOS] Cannot recognize spaces on path names

Asked By wexler 0 points N/A Posted on - 01/30/2012

I have over 200 fragments in my Outlook Express .pst file which I need to fix.  References to contig.exe (a defragmentation tool) on various forums were downloaded.  After the preparatory steps, I popped up the command prompt and typed the path of the file.  However, the command prompt cannot deal with spaces in folder names, for example, ”Documents and Settings”.

I need advice on this.  Any help is appreciated.

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Answered By Michelle Bang 55 points N/A #95527

[MS-DOS] Cannot recognize spaces on path names

There is a very simple solution for this. You just have to short down the path in order to do it. The only thing to do is just put the path that you want to open in cmd within the inverted commas.

• Like "C:Documents and SettingsUsersAccounts" . This will do the work for you.
• However if you have a really long name of a file or a folder, that is difficult for the DOS to read and that is why you need to convert it to short length. The method that is derived for this is as follows
• If the file name is long for example "accounting presentation.doc" then just use the first few letters like "accountingpre" without space and put ~1 or ~2 after that so it makes "accountingpre~1.doc" and it will be able to read it.

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• Posted on - 01/30/2012
• Question Category: DOS & Windows