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Accepted
Don Dickinson
Asked: 2011-02-04 06:54:44 +0800 CST

command prompt DIR with wildcard returns unexpected results

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I am running 2003 server (latest service pack). When i type this on the command line:

dir 2010*

or 

 dir 2010*.*

i receive this as the result: 

    02/01/2011  02:34 PM             2,460 2011-02-01-14-34-23-807.mdn  
    02/02/2011  08:59 AM             3,757 2011-02-02-08-59-32-604.req  
    02/01/2011  09:16 AM               235 2011-02-01-09-16-35-104.dat  
    02/02/2011  05:06 PM               460 2011-02-02-17-06-05-166.log  
    02/01/2011  03:31 PM            66,570 2011-02-01-15-31-27-838.dat  
    02/01/2011  03:16 PM               145 2011-02-01-15-16-51-135.log  
    02/01/2011  08:52 PM         1,608,916 2011-02-01-20-52-57-416.req
                   7 File(s)      1,682,543 bytes  
                   0 Dir(s)  42,891,452,416 bytes free

can anyone tell me why? i was expecting to see a list of only files that begin with "2010". there are no such files in the directory, so i wasn't expecting to see anything. i must either misunderstand how DIR handles wildcards or i'm doing something stupid.

command-line-interface

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This answer on Super User from user grawity reveals that the answer lies in the way Windows creates 8.3 filenames and that the DIR command looks at both filenames.

    You can see what's happening by using DIR /X to show the short filenames.

    From that answer:

    When using the NTFS filesystem, 8.3 name creation can be disabled system-wide using: 

        fsutil behavior set disable8dot3

    However, this won't affect existing names.

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  2. dir /OD will sort my date so from there in powershell equivalent would be Get-ChildItem | Sort-Object Date and if you include something Where-Object {!$_.Mode -match "h"} it should do the trick

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