Question

I was playing around and executed the following .bat

@echo off
mkdir %~dp0
pause

This created two directories at the batch location:

• “and”
• “Settings” (inside this: “Usuario”, inisde this “Escritorio”, inisde this “123”)

Note: I executed the batch from a “123” directory

I want some background to understand what just happened

Answer 1

The mkdir command makes all the directories specified on the command line (separated by spaces). For example,

mkdir foo bar

will make the directories foo and bar. In your case, the argument is C:\Documents and Settings\Usuario\Escritorio\123, equivalent to:

mkdir C:\Documents and Settings\Usuario\Escritorio\123

Since mkdir doesn’t know any different, it thinks you want to create the three directories named:

• C:\Documents
• and
• Settings\Usuario\Escritorio\123

You could try doing:

mkdir "%~dp0"

and see if the double quotes help.