The Old New Thing

The curse of the current directory

November 9, 2010 Nov 9, 2010 11/9/10

Raymond Chen

The current directory is both a convenience and a curse. It's a convenience because it saves you a lot of typing and enables the use of relative paths. It's a curse because of everything else. The root cause of this curse is that the Windows NT family of operating systems keeps open a handle to the process's current directory. (Pre-...