Why a program doesn't work when run from a batch file, but works when clicked

Posted by ibobev 3 days ago

Comments

Comment by xg15 2 hours ago

> Explorer sets the current directory of the program to the directory containing the thing that you double-clicked

I found the linked article to informative and confirming my suspicion: "The thing that you clicked" doesn't have to be the executable - it could also be a document with the executable registered as launch handler, in which case the current directory will be the directory of the document.

Would be interesting to know how links and items in shell namespaces are handled.

Comment by tveita 2 hours ago

How much are these customers paying for support to have Raymond Chen on first level support to debug their batch files?

Comment by ninjagoo 2 hours ago

> How much are these customers paying for support to have Raymond Chen on first level support to debug their batch files?

Or rather, maybe, how bad are the initial support levels that couldn't figure out basic functionality like this and it was escalated to Chen?

Or maybe he was on a project working directly with the client already, so this was just part of whatever he was working on.

Comment by cowanon77 20 minutes ago

The post doesn’t mention a year. Early Microsoft Windows was very badly documented and the docs were difficult to search, so it wouldn't surprise me that it took senior level support to know that fact.

Comment by LatencyKills 1 hour ago

I was an engineer on the Visual Studio team. Many of the issues I worked on were things I found interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if Chen was browsing through open tickets, found this one, and grabbed it.

Comment by cucumber3732842 1 hour ago

Senior people like Raymond Chen (or at least the good ones) often get to where they are by doing some amount of work that's "below them" or outside their scope in order to keep their understanding of the full stack up to date.

It wouldn't surprise me if he's periodically snooping the lowest level support queues from time to time to understand what kinds of issues customers face, where the pain points are, etc, etc.