"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
Some early Unix shells produced the equally-cryptic
Famous quotes containing the words bad, command and/or file:
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)
“We can’t command our love, but we can our actions.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“Probably nothing in the experience of the rank and file of workers causes more bitterness and envy than the realization which comes sooner or later to many of them that they are “stuck” and can go no further.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)