C:\\TPS Cover Sheets<\/code> directory.\nThe error message they got was\nCannot load cover sheets. The directory name is invalid<\/i>.\n<\/p>\n\nThe customer did some troubleshooting and determined that\n“The cover sheet directory is missing,\nand we have a file instead.”\n<\/p>\n
\nC:\\>dir\n Volume in drive C is INITECH\n Volume Serial Number is BAAD-F00D\n Directory of C:\\\n09\/18\/2006 02:43 PM 24 autoexec.bat\n09\/18\/2006 02:43 PM 10 config.sys\n03\/18\/2009 10:30 AM <DIR> Program Files\n11\/21\/2008 01:04 PM 1,677 TPS Cover Sheets\n02\/20\/2008 10:39 AM <DIR> Users\n05\/29\/2009 02:23 PM <DIR> Windows\n 2 File(s) 1,711 bytes\n 3 Dir(s) 229,031,751,680 bytes free\n<\/pre>\n\nOne of my colleagues employed psychic powers to determine that\nat the time the customer tried to install the sample cover sheet\non the machine,\nthe C:\\TPS Cover Sheets<\/code> directory did not yet exist<\/i>,\nand that the batch file they used to set up a new computer\njust does a\ncopy \\\\server\\TPSConfig\\Sample.tps \"C:\\TPS Cover Sheets\"<\/code>,\nwhich results in a file being created with the name\nC:\\TPS Cover Sheets<\/code>.\n<\/p>\n\nThe customer was surprised by this conclusion.\n“I would think that copy will fail if the\nC:\\TPS Cover Sheets<\/code> directory doesn’t exist,\nbut this might be our problem.\nWe’ll look into it.”\n(I guess this customer never used the copy command to copy a file\nto a new name.)\n<\/p>\n\nIf the destination of a copy<\/code> command exists and is a\ndirectory, then the source files are copied into that directory.\nIf the destination of a copy<\/code> command does not exists\nor if it exists and is a file,\nthen the destination is treated as a file name for the destination.\n(If there is more than one source file, then they are concatenated\nas if they were text files.)\n<\/p>\n\nThe customer went back and checked the scripts,\nand the line they used was almost exactly what my colleague\npredicted:\n<\/p>\n
\ncopy \"\\\\INITECH\\Defaults\\Sample cover sheet.tps\" \"C:\\TPS Cover Sheets\" \/Y\n<\/pre>\n\nIf the C:\\TPS Cover Sheets<\/code> directory hasn’t been created\nyet, then that would explain the behavior they’re seeing:\nThe copy<\/code> command sees that the destination doesn’t exist\nand assumes you are doing a file-to-file copy\n(as opposed to a file-to-directory copy).\nIn this case, the problem was that copying a sample cover sheet was\na step they added to their setup scripts, but they added it before\nthe step that creates the cover sheet directory.\nReordering the two steps fixed the problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story is inspired by an actual customer problem. The program LitWare.exe is used for TPS management, and when you want to create a new TPS report, you have to pick a cover sheet. The program shows you the cover sheets that have been defined, which it loads from the C:\\TPS Cover Sheets directory. The […]<\/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":[104],"class_list":["post-15903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-tipssupport"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"
This story is inspired by an actual customer problem. The program LitWare.exe is used for TPS management, and when you want to create a new TPS report, you have to pick a cover sheet. The program shows you the cover sheets that have been defined, which it loads from the C:\\TPS Cover Sheets directory. The […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15903","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=15903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15903\/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=15903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}