the frig blig

parentheses in cmd dir listing

I’ve been working at the cmd line for lo these many years and this morning did a double-take when a simple directory listing displayed parentheses around the file size field for some of the files — to wit:

d:\t>dir mpatch Volume in drive D is data Volume Serial Number is 449E-5616


 Directory of d:\t\mpatch
12/28/2006  13:37    <DIR>          .

12/28/2006  13:37    <DIR>          ..

02/15/2005  09:00         1,603,584 Patch10.msp

02/15/2005  09:00          (23,047) Patch10.txt

02/15/2005  09:00             1,452 PkgCatalog.z

02/15/2005  09:00            65,536 Setup.exe

02/15/2005  09:00              (71) Setup.ini

02/15/2005  09:00          (43,460) VS800Det.mcs

               6 File(s)      1,737,150 bytes

               2 Dir(s)  17,330,139,136 bytes free
d:\t>osver

Windows 2003 (NT 5.2) Server Build 3790, Service Pack 1

d:\t>

If anyone knows what this means I’d sure love to hear it. So far Googling hasn’t evinced the answer.

What a weird thing to wake up to!

And now look, my pasted screen scrape dir listing above is being formatted by HTML or Wordpress — I enclosed it inside a ‘code’ block but apparently there’s more to instructing “hands-off, no formatting” than that. No time to fix it now, I’ll get that later.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 6:35 am and is filed under geeky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “parentheses in cmd dir listing”

Henrik Møller Jørgensen Says:
June 26th, 2009 at 1:44 am
We just had a similar problem. It’s the offline parameter that is set on the files… whatever that means.

Henrik

parentheses in cmd dir listing

One Response to “parentheses in cmd dir listing”

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