Turn off subst

The October 10, 2015 Tip of the Night showed how you can use the subst command to deal with files that won't open in Explorer because their file path exceeds 255 characters. You must just get this error message:

Go into Windows command prompt and nter the command 'subst' followed by a drive letter and then a folder path. This folder path holding files with paths longer than 255 characters gets substituted as a drive letter, allowing you to open the file.

The tip from last year didn't say how to remove the temporary drive mapping. You may not have the option to delete the drive letter in Windows Explorer. In order to disconnect the drive letter, simply enter the command subst Z: /D .

forfiles command

You can use the Windows command, forfiles, to find which files in a directory have been modified after a certain date. If you right click in the directory you want to review, and select 'Open command window here' . . .

. . . you can get the command prompt and enter the 'forfiles' command followed by the operators /S and /D. [ '/S' directs the command to search all subfolders in the directory.] and then a date preceded by a plus or minus. Using a plus will get all dates after your specified data, a minus will get all dates before it.

The '/D' operator lets you run the search from today's date. So if you want a list of all files modified more than 30 days ago, you'd enter the command this way.

Clip to get results of Windows command

I have been familiar for a long time of the function in a windows command of the greater than sign. It directs the results of a command to a text file. So for example with the common command to list the contents of a directory (see the very first Tip of the Night) the command 'dir' followed by the operator '/b' (to restrict the generated list to just the file names in root folder in which the command is entered) is followed by >list.txt to direct the list to the named text file. However you can save yourself some trouble by instead just directing the list to your clipboard. Enter the command with a pipe then 'clip' at the end.

Now you will get a list of the files in the c:\helloworld directory on your clipboard that you can paste anywhere.