Scandinavian chars in cmd-files

Got a scriptingquestion from a colleague, wasn’t that easy to find on google.

But with Windows Search I did find an old cmd-script that had exactly that problem sorted out.

So, the question was about scandinavian chars in a cmd-script. Some paths are named with non English letters and when you use them in a script it translates to a strange char instead of the letter.

This works fine:

DEL /F /Q "%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Some Directory\*.*"

This doesn’t work since there is a scandinavian letter in the path:

DEL /F /Q "%USERPROFILE%\Lokala inställningar\Some Directory\*.*"

To fix it you need to change codepage, like this:

CHCP 850
DEL /F /Q "%USERPROFILE%\Lokala inställningar\Some Directory\*.*"

You might need to use different codepage depending on the language you are using.

Some more info on MSDN