oops, but this fixes that...i ran it in a long name dir, thought it had spaces... for %%A in ("%~dp0.") do echo %%~nA nobody's perfect...lol [it *was* 5am when i wrote it! ] was trying to re-encode my music to my phone in diff dirs and keep the artist\album\song.ext structure.. and just tried this, so if you want to go more than 2 dirs up, use for %%A in (".\..\..\..") do echo %%~nA goes up 4 dirs.. etc to go up as many as you want... or relative to batch file itself: for %%A in ("%~dp0.\..\..\..") do echo %%~nA it's: .=1 file's dir ..=2 parent dir [or.\..] .\..\..=3 up [the parent dirs parent dir] .\..\..\..=4 up etc etc.. that one surprised me even..nice n short too.. from cmdline try it out: for %a in (".\..\..") do echo %~na [since not starting with a file, no leading .] was there smart juice in my orange juice this morning or what? lol yesterday i wrote 24->12hr + am/pm conversion completely inside a sqlite query... and dude, i've learned so much over the years from you it's silly...thanx so much for sharing...