The 12th of Diduary: Did you know you can drag Windows Explorer to the command line?

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!