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    While the question has been answered, a neat upshot of this is that different drives maintain different working directories - and you can refer to them by the drive letter! copy aFile e: will copy aFile to e:'s working directory, for example.
    – Phoshi
    Commented Jun 26, 2011 at 22:07
  • The irony, Phoshi, is that in Windows NT, including Windows NT version 6.1 as in the question, that is not the case for the operating system proper. There's only one current directory for a process. The old MS/PC/DR-DOS semantics of separately maintained working directories for each drive are emulated (but not exactly) via a system of hidden environment variables.
    – JdeBP
    Commented Jun 27, 2011 at 10:48
  • It is indeed true, that there are (even if emulated) multiple current directories. For further information read this nice article blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2010/10/11/10073890.aspx by Raymond Chen
    – HalloDu
    Commented Jun 27, 2011 at 13:28
  • It’s not surprising or ironic, it’s because Windows and DOS have completely different interfaces. Yes every process (even in DOS) gets a single item in response to a GWD command, but otherwise Windows and DOS function very differently. You can’t printf from a non-console Windows program either. ;-)
    – Synetech
    Commented Jun 28, 2011 at 0:45
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    cd /d "D:\path"
    – T.Todua
    Commented Jun 3, 2020 at 10:59