{"id":15153,"date":"2010-01-28T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-28T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2010\/01\/28\/what-idiot-would-hard-code-the-path-to-notepad\/"},"modified":"2010-01-28T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-28T07:00:00","slug":"what-idiot-would-hard-code-the-path-to-notepad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20100128-00\/?p=15153","title":{"rendered":"What idiot would hard-code the path to Notepad?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There seemed to be a great deal of disbelief that anybody would hard-code the path to Notepad<\/a>.\n Here’s one example<\/a> and here’s another<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There’s a large class of problems that go like this: <\/p>\n

I’m running Program X, and when I tell it to view the error log, I get this error message: CreateProcess of \"C:\\Windows\\Notepad.exe errorlog.txt\" failed: error 2<\/a>: The system cannot find the file specified.<\/code> What is wrong and how do I fix it? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Obviously, the file C:\\Windows\\Notepad.exe<\/code> is missing. But how can that be? Well, Windows Server 2008 bit the bullet and removed one of the copies of Notepad. Once you learn this, troubleshooting the above problem becomes a simple exercise in psychic debugging. <\/p>\n

My psychic powers tell me that you’re running Windows Server 2008. The Notepad program no longer exists in the Windows directory; it’s now in the system directory. Find the setting for your program that lets you change the program used for viewing error logs and tell it to use C:\\Windows\\System32\\Notepad.exe<\/code>. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, this tip works only if the program permits you to change the program used for viewing error logs. If they hard-code the path, then you’ll have to find some other workaround. (For example, you might try using the CorrectFilePaths shim<\/a>.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There seemed to be a great deal of disbelief that anybody would hard-code the path to Notepad. Here’s one example and here’s another. There’s a large class of problems that go like this: I’m running Program X, and when I tell it to view the error log, I get this error message: CreateProcess of “C:\\Windows\\Notepad.exe errorlog.txt” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-15153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-code"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

There seemed to be a great deal of disbelief that anybody would hard-code the path to Notepad. Here’s one example and here’s another. There’s a large class of problems that go like this: I’m running Program X, and when I tell it to view the error log, I get this error message: CreateProcess of “C:\\Windows\\Notepad.exe errorlog.txt” […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}