I chopped the "Documents and Settings" Pathname!

[Spoon2001]

One of the nutty things about Windows is the long built-in pathnames, like

"c:\Documents and Settings\My Long User Name\My Documents"

I have successfully shortened the first part to:

c:\ds\j

DS is my new "Documents and Settings" folder. "J" is my User Profile
folder.

This is not for the faint of heart!!! I do not know what screwy things are
going to happen with my system now! But so far, nothing horrible.

How to do it -

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/userpath.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/236621/EN-US/

There is a lot that these articles fail to mention, though!

 

[Stan Brown]

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 12:54:30 -0500 from Spoon2001

One of the nutty things about Windows is the long built-in pathnames, like

"c:\Documents and Settings\My Long User Name\My Documents"

I have successfully shortened the first part to:

c:\ds\j

DS is my new "Documents and Settings" folder. "J" is my User Profile
folder.

This is not for the faint of heart!!! I do not know what screwy things are
going to happen with my system now! But so far, nothing horrible.

How to do it -

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/userpath.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/236621/EN-US/

There is a lot that these articles fail to mention, though!

If you need to access My Documents frequently, IMHO there are at
least two better approaches.

(A) Create a shortcut on your desktop. To do this, open My Computer,
navigate to the appropriate My Documents, and right-drag it to the
desktop. When you release the right mouse button, select Create
Shortcut Here from the pop-up menu.

(B) Create a file somewhere called anything.bat (i.e., any name with
a ".bat" extension) and containing
subst j: "c"\Documents and Settings\My Long User Name\My Documents"
Double-click it, and new fake drive j: will point to your documents
folder.
To make this happen automatically in future, right-click on the
Windows Start button and select Explore. In the window that opens,
double-click Programs and then Startup. Right-drag the anything.bat
file into the Startup folder and select Create Shortcut Here.

 

[Alec S.]

(B) Create a file somewhere called anything.bat (i.e., any name with
a ".bat" extension) and containing
subst j: "c"\Documents and Settings\My Long User Name\My Documents"
Double-click it, and new fake drive j: will point to your documents
folder.
To make this happen automatically in future, right-click on the
Windows Start button and select Explore. In the window that opens,
double-click Programs and then Startup. Right-drag the anything.bat
file into the Startup folder and select Create Shortcut Here.

Yup, subst is an extremely easy and handy way of shortening paths. I highly recommend it. Be aware however that sometimes subst'ed
drives don't work, that is, some apps don't like them. For this purpose however, it should be just fine.

 

[Stan Brown]

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 12:58:07 -0400 from Stan Brown

(B) Create a file somewhere called anything.bat (i.e., any name with
a ".bat" extension) and containing
subst j: "c"\Documents and Settings\My Long User Name\My Documents"

Sorry -- a really unfortunate typo that wasn't caught by the spell
checker. :-(

subst j: "c:\Documents and Settings\My Long User Name\My Documents"

 

[Stan Brown]

Yup, subst is an extremely easy and handy way of shortening paths.
I highly recommend it. Be aware however that sometimes subst'ed
drives don't work, that is, some apps don't like them. For this
purpose however, it should be just fine.

Do you have any specific apps in mind?

There used to be a problem with earlier OSes, but AFAIK subst is
completely integrated in Win XP. If there are any apps where it
doesn't work -- other than the obvious ones that access the hardware
directly -- I'd like to know.

 

[Alec S.]

Do you have any specific apps in mind?

There used to be a problem with earlier OSes, but AFAIK subst is
completely integrated in Win XP. If there are any apps where it
doesn't work -- other than the obvious ones that access the hardware
directly -- I'd like to know.

Well for one thing, some apps/games check the TYPE of the drive. For instance, a program may check to see if the drive is a CDROM
drive (type 0x05). In this case, it won't work because subst'd drives always take on the type, size, free space, and all other
characteristics, of the host drive. Therefore you would not be able to use subst to "fakecd" a folder for such apps/games.
Basically all subst does is to create a virtual drive where the root=the target folder. The root of the virtual drive will even
contain the current and parent links (. and ..) which some apps/games may check for.