This is what you get when you enter “xcopy /?” on a Vista command prompt. Of course, you can still use xcopy, but it isn’t wrong to move to Robocopy now. It has many interesting features.

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You can now download Microsoft’s new command line shell and scripting language. If you don’t run an English Windows version, make sure that you also get the Multilingual User Interface Package. It is interesting to note that there is not yet a version for Windows Vista. You can download Windows Powershell 1.0 RC2, but it is only for Vista RC1. There seems to be a big interest in Powershell, judging from the number of comments in the relatively new Powershell blog. However, I think, most Windows administrators will need some time to make friends with the idea of going back to the command line, like in the good old times of MS DOS. Okay, Powershell is a bit more powerful.

PowerShell originally was planned as a part of Windows Vista. Now, it seems it might be available even before Vista since RC2 is already available. I’ve read many marvellous things about Microsoft’s new command line shell. Some say that even Unix admins will get envious. This remains to be seen, though.

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ProcessWatchV2 is a simple, free tool which allows you to automatically:

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XDir and YourDir are two very different Windows programs, but they basically have the same purpose. They create your directory structure’s output which you can use for further processing. XDir is a powerful command line tool, whereas, YourDir is a relatively easy-to-use Windows tool with a GUI.

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I welcome every tip that helps me to avoid typing. If one drags a file or folder from the Windows Explorer to the command line, the whole path plus the file name will be copied there. You might say, I should have known this. Indeed, you are right, but I didn’t. I found this tip at Digital Inspiration. The blog post there discusses some useful command line tools. Many of them are well known to most sysops though.

If you are old enough, you might remember the time when it was quite usual to work on the command line even on a Microsoft system. I am talking about the era of the good old MS DOS. My favourite file manager was the Norton Commander. When I switched to Windows this was the only tool I really missed. Nowadays, it is still usual to work on the command line on Linux boxes, especially when you log on over a WAN. Now, GNU Midnight Commander is one of my favourite tools under Linux. It looks exactly like the good old Norton Commander and has the same functionality plus some Linux specific features like browsing RPM files. (more…)