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:

    “We all have bad days, of course, a secret that only makes us feel more guilty. But once my friends and I started telling the truth about how far we deviated from perfection, we couldn’t stop. . . . One mother admitted leaving the grocery store without her kids—”I just forgot them. The manager found them in the frozen foods aisle, eating Eskimo Pies.””
    —Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)

    “How did you get in the Navy? How did you get on our side? Ah, you ignorant, arrogant, ambitious—keeping sixty two men in prison cause you got a palm tree for the work they did. I don’t know which I hate worse, you or that malignant growth that stands outside your door. How did you ever get command of a ship? I realize in wartime they have to scrape the bottom of the barrel. But where’d they ever scrape you up?”
    —Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)

    “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)