cd "My Documents"

John was complaining about this not working so I wrote MyDoc.bat:

@REM This will work if you did not redirect “My Documents"

@%HOMEDRIVE%

@cd %HOMEPATH%\My Documents

Is there a better way?

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 07, 2006
  You should add a %HOMEDRIVE% command to insure that you're on the proper drive.
  
  %HOMEDRIVE%
  cd %HOMEPATH%My Documents
  
• Anonymous
  April 07, 2006
  Thanks but I already do it. BTW, on Vista, you would need to change this to:
  %HOMEDRIVE%
  @cd %HOMEPATH%Documents
  
• Anonymous
  April 07, 2006

1. AFAIK you can use UserProfile instead of the separate HOMEDRIVE and HOMEPATH
   2) you can change drive and path at the same time with cd /d
   
   So:
   @cd /d "%UserProfile%My Documents"
   
   Note that either of those approaches are actually busted - the user can redirect their "my documents" to basically any arbitrary path (many in my office point it to D:My Documents) - the above is just the default location.
   
   Now, that's likely written into HKCU somewhere, so if you wanted to support that, I'd imagine it's a reg.exe call, parse it out (perhaps with "for"), cache it into a env var (so we don't have to do the check each time :) and do the cd.
   
   On a semi-related note, in Monad the $home variable is already set for you, and parsing the registry contents would, of course, be simpler.

• Anonymous
  April 16, 2006
  Thanks Jim.
  How would you use USERPROFILE?
  If you do
  
  D:>cd %userprofile%
  
  and
  
  USERPROFILE=C:Documents and Settingsjmanning
  
  this won't work or am I missing your point?
  
  On my machines, I do redirect My DOCUMENTS so this batch file is actually tailored but I shall follow your suggestion about using reg.exe.
  
  Thanks again.
• Anonymous
  June 10, 2006
  The key point to notice is the quotes I added.
  
  @cd /d "%UserProfile%My Documents"
• Anonymous
  June 10, 2006
  Thanks James.