The Old New Thing

One-line batch script to delete empty directories

April 17, 2008 Apr 17, 2008 04/17/08
Raymond Chen
You don't need a whole 260KB program to do it. This batch file does the trick just fine: I call it . This is the long-forgotten follow-up to Performing an operation in each subdirectory of a directory tree from batch. We're using the same technique as in that article, but pumping the result through "" to reverse the order of the ...

Raymond misreads newspaper headlines, episode 2

April 16, 2008 Apr 16, 2008 04/16/08
Raymond Chen
I have a strange tendency to misread newspaper headlines. This week, I read the headline Rogan Sets 200 Back World Record, and I thought, "There's a world record for running 200 meters backward?" Well, actually there is, but this article was actually about the 200 meter backstroke (swimming). Once I figured that out, I was not confused by...

Email tip: Nostalgia is not a question

April 15, 2008 Apr 15, 2008 04/15/08
Raymond Chen
This is another special case of Don't forget to ask your question, indeed an even more extreme case of Making some statements and asking for advice isn't a question. I remember in version X, we used to be able to accomplish Task Q by clicking on W and then selecting X. Now you have to click on Y and select Z...

Follow-up: That shopautodotca seocontest online contest

April 14, 2008 Apr 14, 2008 04/14/08
Raymond Chen
So I didn't win the shopautodotca seocontest search engine optimization contest, so I decided to check on how the actual winners were faring. After all, one of the winners was supposed to become the company's SEO manager. The top prize winners in the Google category and in the MSN category have both complained that they haven't received ...

Why doesn't Explorer let you create a file whose name begins with a dot?

April 14, 2008 Apr 14, 2008 04/14/08
Raymond Chen
Rolf Viehmann asks why Explorer doesn't let you create a file whose name begins with a dot. Such files are considered to have an extension but no name. If the extension is known and the user has chosen to hide known extensions, the resulting file would have no name at all! If you really want to create a file with a leading dot in its name, ...

We can't cut that; it's our last feature

April 11, 2008 Apr 11, 2008 04/11/08
Raymond Chen
Many years ago, I was asked to help a customer with a problem they were having. I don't remember the details, and they aren't important to the story anyway, but as I was investigating one of their crashes, I started to wonder why they were even doing it. I expressed my concerns to the customer liaison. "Why are they writing this code in the ...