Windows: how to get start tool to override a local start.exe?

The start command has been very handy, but I ran into a problem.

I was looking at an old Role Playing game (Questron II) and how to write maps for it. And it had a file called start.exe. And I have a utility that calls, to edit itself,

start "" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe" x.pl

So in this directory, it pulls the "start.exe" instead of the Windows start.

Running Search Everything didn't turn up a location for start.(extension).

Now, there are obvious workarounds for this instance, such as just pulling the map files I need to a separate directory.

But I'm more concerned with how I would find start.exe, or start.bat, or whatever its extension is, or if it is protected for a reason.

Thanks!

2 Answers

How I would find start.exe, or start.bat?

The Windows start command is an internal command (built into the cmd shell):

Internal commands

The Windows CMD shell CMD.exe contains a number of 'internal' commands, additional 'external' commands are also supplied as separate executable files. External commands are generally stored in the C:\WINDOWS\System32 folder, this folder is part of the system PATH .

This arrangement means that both internal and external commands are always available no matter what your current directory happens to be.

ASSOC, BREAK, CALL ,CD/CHDIR, CLS, COLOR, COPY, DATE, DEL, DIR, DPATH, ECHO, ENDLOCAL, ERASE, EXIT, FOR, FTYPE, GOTO, IF, KEYS, MD/MKDIR, MKLINK (vista and above), MOVE, PATH, PAUSE, POPD, PROMPT, PUSHD, REM, REN/RENAME, RD/RMDIR, SET, SETLOCAL, SHIFT, START, TIME, TITLE, TYPE, VER, VERIFY, VOL

Source - Internal commands - Windows CMD - SS64.com

Given that START is an internal command from CMD.EXE, you could execute it thru the later.

Reading from the CMD.EXE help, we find out that:

Starts a new instance of the Windows command interpreter
CMD [/A | /U] [/Q] [/D] [/E:ON | /E:OFF] [/F:ON | /F:OFF] [/V:ON | /V:OFF] [[/S] [/C | /K] string]
/C Carries out the command specified by string and then terminates

So you can execute your program with:

CMD.EXE /C "START "" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe" x.pl"

This way you can assure that what is executed is CMD.EXE, and it executes it's START internal command with the parameters that you want it to have.