Today is the twelvth day of Diduary. You can see links to all of the published articles in the series here.

There are still many times that I use a command prompt to navigate my file system. As a child of DOS, commands, like “dir /w” are still very fluent for me. But as Windows has grown, so too have the length of file addresses. It used to be that I would install everything to C:, and now it’s in a file location 8 folders deep.

I’m ready to admit that perhaps typing those addresses in a command prompt just don’t make as much sense as they used to. As it turns out, there’s a much easier way to do it, too.

From any Windows Explorer window, there’s a little folder icon in the address bar.

Drag that icon to your command prompt, and it will write the fully defined file location on your command line. Like this:

I had to type the “cd” before I dragged the file location in, but you can see that it allowed me to use that path, rather than typing it. Time savings, for the win!