Windows 8 Regedit requires absolute paths passed in for registry files

Question

I was building a set of batch scripts for our automatic build/test system which runs across different operating systems to set some conditions for the different environments and I noticed that Windows 8 seems to handle regedit.exe command line arguments differently than Windows XP through 7.

I was running the command:

regedit.exe /s relative_path\registry_settings.reg

This worked correctly until we got to a Windows 8 node, at which point it didn't emit any errors but moved on as if it worked without making any of the registry changes. (and then my entire test suite failed and scared me)

To get Windows 8 to work I had to use an absolute path as such:

regedit.exe /s \absolute_path\registry_settings.reg

Is this a deliberate change from Microsoft, or is it likely that there is an environment setting affecting this? Is there a better solution than using an absolute path (which is brittle and will require more future maintenance)?

Answer 1

In a batch script, you can use %~dp0 to represent the directory that contains the running batch script. So if you had files at the following locations:

C:\scripts\script.bat
C:\scripts\relative_path\registry_settings.reg

you could write this in script.bat:

regedit.exe /s "%~dp0relative_path\registry_settings.reg"

and get all the benefits of relative paths and still work on Windows 8.