Bad Command or File Name

"Bad command or file name" is a common error message in Microsoft's MS-DOS and some other operating systems.

In command.com, the message Bad command or file name is produced if the user mistypes the first word of a command line. This first word must be either the name of a built-in "command", or of an executable file or batch file. Therefore the error was printing what, to the programmer, was an accurate description of the problem: there was no such command and there was no such file. Novices, in general, had trouble understanding the message, so later operating systems changed it; for instance, OS/2 and the Windows NT (and newer) family use is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

Some early Unix shells produced the equally-cryptic : no such file or directory (because they searched for a file matching the command name and this is the strerror when a file of a given name is not found). Most modern shells produce : Command not found.

Famous quotes containing the words bad, command and/or file:

    “He wrote me sad Mother’s Day stories. He’d always kill me in the stories and tell me how bad he felt about it. It was enough to bring a tear to a mother’s eye.”
    —Connie Zastoupil, U.S. mother of Quentin Tarantino, director of film Pulp Fiction. Rolling Stone, p. 76 (December 29, 1994)

    “‘Tis not in mortals to command success,
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    “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “Science Fiction” ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”
    —Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)