Question

At the command prompt, type cd etc and press Enter. What error message did you receive and why?

Answer 1

You will get an error message : The system cannot find the path specified

Cause of "The system cannot find the path specified." Error

It seems this error occurs when you have invalid paths in your PATH environment variable e.g. directories which don't exist anymore. To find out if that's the case just run following command in your DOS command prompt:

You can see that after printing some paths, the command prompt is throwing "The system cannot find the path specified." error again, which means it has nothing to do with Tomcat or Catalina but just with the PATH environment variable. There are some directories in the PATH which system is not able to resolve or find, hence it is throwing "The system cannot find the path specified." error.

To be honest, the error message makes sense if you read it, but we are so used to panic when we see the error, we don't try to understand the error message in first place. Now that, we have tried printing the value of PATH environment variable and seeing the message after few valid PATH, it suddenly starts making more sense.

This error is nothing to do with Tomcat, it can come while running any program/application from command prompt or even when a program trying to use the PATH environment variable.