Drive Letter Economics

On Windows there is a fun property of the command line (not quite DOS) where you cannot change directory to a UNC path. This effectively makes it impossible to set your working directory to a UNC path from a batch file. To address this issue Microsoft has two methods of switching to a UNC path.

You can NET USE the path as a drive letter. However, you have to be sure that the drive letter you chose is not in use. When running in a large multi-user environment, you can see how this would become troublesome. More importantly, NET USE is semi-permanent, living for as long as the computer is on. You must unuse the drive letter assignment to free this up for other people.

Your other option is pushd which pushes a path name onto a virtual stack, making the path you specify the current working directory. If you pushd a UNC path, it is assigned a drive letter from the pool of open drive letters. Now, this too is semi-permanent (i.e. outlives the cmd instance it was done in). This assignment lives on until you unuse it or use popd. The more vexing part is on Windows 2000 Server these drive letter assignments affect everyone who uses the machine.

Let's say user A has a script that calls pushd without popd, if his script gets run enough times, eventually Windows 2000 Server machines begin running out of drive letters. So when user B's script runs on a machine without free drive letters, they are greeted with this fun message:

C:\>PUSHD \\machine\unc\path\here\
' ' is an invalid current directory path.  UNC paths are not supported.

Aren't you glad you get an error message which reflects the problem?

Now on Windows 2003 Server this problem is non-existent. Users can only muck up drive letter assignments for themselves, not for everyone logged in to a machine. However, upgrading production servers to another operating system is not always a valid fix. The problem does not go away, just users are insulated from other users.

The correct solution is to follow the best practices and have a matching popd for ever pushd call you make. Of course, it wouldn't be a best practice if nobody ignored it.