For complicated reasons, J’ai been forced to make an identical copy of cmd.exe and rename it to cmd-2.exe, which I put as a shortcut on the Taskbar to have them “grouped” in different taskbar groups.
Sometimes, I forget about this, and to open a new cmd.exe I middle-click that Taskbar icon to open a new cmd.exe. I then type a command such as dir and it spits out a bunch of nonsense, including: DNS bad key, which only happens if I accidentally use cmd-2.exe, not if I ouvrez le “real” cmd.exe, so it’s not a “practical” problem.
Cependant, I wonder why that message is ever printed at all. Is it apparently failing to do some kind of DNS lookup or something? Pourquoi DNS involved at all with issuing dir to list files on my local computer? J’ai no network set up, no cloud drives, nothing like that whatsoever. It scares me that (apparently) there are DNS queries being made when I issue dir.
Maybe DNS bad key refers to something completely unrelated to the Domain Name System? Je ne sais pas what a “bad key” would even be in that context.
The second cmd.exe fails to locate and subsequently load the localized strings from the cmd.exe.mui satellite resource library.
Here is what it really attempts to say, taken from a 10.0.18362.1 (160101.0800):
0x235F: “Volume in drive %1 is %2”
0x235B: “Volume Serial Number is %1”
0x2339: “Directory of %1”
This is actually the first three lines of a plain dir command output.
This is a funny one. There are no entries for messages numbers 0x235F and 0x235B in the default system message table. So for the first two outputs, you get that cryptic message as shown in @harrymc’s console screenshot.
But for 0x2339, there is an entry in the default system message table, physically stored in KernelBase.dll.mui pointing to the text “DNS bad key”:
It just so happens to share the number of the “Directory of %1” line of the command processor’s resources: a fallback not anticipated by the developers of cmd.exe. So the DNS reference is just a coincidence, it could be anything.
Notez que the proper message contains a variable argument (the directory name), while the DNS message doesn’t. I guess that’s why there is no more output après cela - it might just terminate.