Command Line Geeks?
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I'm thinking about posting a handful of articles on tools only of interest to those of us who live in console windows. The question, of course, is whether it's worth it. How many of you live with one or more command prompts open and use them for a significant part of your work? Certainly this has faded out over the years - are there any younger than say 35-40 who do this? -- -Blake (com/bcdev/blake)
I still use the command line and batch files a lot. I put up an article an a command line utility for sending email - http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/CpCommandLineEmailer.asp Check it out and let me know what you think.
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I'm thinking about posting a handful of articles on tools only of interest to those of us who live in console windows. The question, of course, is whether it's worth it. How many of you live with one or more command prompts open and use them for a significant part of your work? Certainly this has faded out over the years - are there any younger than say 35-40 who do this? -- -Blake (com/bcdev/blake)
I use the command line all the time...and I'm 16. Does that count? :-D
When I can talk about 64 bit processors and attract girls with my computer not my car, I'll come out of the closet. Until that time...I'm like "What's the ENTER key?" -Hockey on being a geek
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I'm thinking about posting a handful of articles on tools only of interest to those of us who live in console windows. The question, of course, is whether it's worth it. How many of you live with one or more command prompts open and use them for a significant part of your work? Certainly this has faded out over the years - are there any younger than say 35-40 who do this? -- -Blake (com/bcdev/blake)
I use the command line quite a bit, although I can't say I keep it open all the time. I'd be interested in learning about command line tricks, etc.
**"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I'm thinking about posting a handful of articles on tools only of interest to those of us who live in console windows. The question, of course, is whether it's worth it. How many of you live with one or more command prompts open and use them for a significant part of your work? Certainly this has faded out over the years - are there any younger than say 35-40 who do this? -- -Blake (com/bcdev/blake)
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I'm thinking about posting a handful of articles on tools only of interest to those of us who live in console windows. The question, of course, is whether it's worth it. How many of you live with one or more command prompts open and use them for a significant part of your work? Certainly this has faded out over the years - are there any younger than say 35-40 who do this? -- -Blake (com/bcdev/blake)
Well, I guess you know this after the thread in the OS/Admin forum, but I use CMD quite a bit. I also use the [Win]+[R] key combination quite a lot - it can be easier to type what I'm looking for than to locate it. Annoyances: you can type 'My Documents' into the address bar in Explorer or IE, but it doesn't work from Start > Run. Most of my automated build scripts consist of batch files - including one I'm fairly proud of that builds two primary interop assemblies with space for signing, rebases the resulting DLLs then signs them. I think the reason Unix admins are so fond of the command line is that, well, for a lot of them there's no other way to do it. You can capture a sequence of commands as a script, then run that script everywhere you need to perform those operations. For Windows, there are still many things (even after Windows Server 2003, which has many more command-line tools) that can't be done from a command line but which can from the GUI. They're often exposed as scriptable objects (e.g. WMI) but there isn't an easy way to go from there (i.e. the GUI) to here (a WMI script). That is, the scripting solution is too far divorced from the regular mode of operation - if you want to script something, you have to learn a completely different way of doing it. Personally I find the GUIs easier the first few times, but then I'll start looking for the command line.
net start mssqlserveris quicker than [Win]+[R],services.msc, browse to SQL Server, hit Start. Having said that,net startdoesn't list available services, you have to know them. I can never remember the FTP server's service name. To list services, you have to usesc.exe, one of the least friendly tools I've ever used... I find it helpful to know the file names for some of the predefined consoles in Windows 2000 and XP. For example, Group Policy editor (which lets you set up privileges) isgpedit.msc, and Device Manager isdevmgmt.msc. Of course Windows - on a Microsoft network - has Group Policy, which automatically applies settings from the domain controller at system startup and logon. So there's a bit less need for logon scripts and applying scripts to each system individually. -
I'm thinking about posting a handful of articles on tools only of interest to those of us who live in console windows. The question, of course, is whether it's worth it. How many of you live with one or more command prompts open and use them for a significant part of your work? Certainly this has faded out over the years - are there any younger than say 35-40 who do this? -- -Blake (com/bcdev/blake)
Yup, I even have the CP command explorer bar thingy installed :-) CTRL-M is my hero. Plus I almost always go to any directories in explorer by doing [WIN]->R and then typing in the path :-D This goes double for "desktop", which is quicker than finding that Show Desktop icon, clicking it, and then waiting 5 years for all the apps to minimize! I share Mike's comment that "My Documents" should be usable. The workaround I've used in the past is to stick a shortcut to that folder in the %WINDIR% directory, called the appropriate thing. -- Ian Darling "The moral of the story is that with a contrived example, you can prove anything." - Joel Spolsky
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I'm thinking about posting a handful of articles on tools only of interest to those of us who live in console windows. The question, of course, is whether it's worth it. How many of you live with one or more command prompts open and use them for a significant part of your work? Certainly this has faded out over the years - are there any younger than say 35-40 who do this? -- -Blake (com/bcdev/blake)
I'm 28, and I use it every now and then. I don't use it as much as I did during the DOS days though. I wish it had the same capabilities such as some of the UNIX shells does. Maybe I should download 4NT.. Hmm. -- Yeah well, my daddy can beat up your daddy!
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Geez! What an idiot.. I guess he never learnt the power of composition of commands. Piping, redirection of in/output streams, and substitutions are VERY powerful things indeed, that NO GUI could ever match (at least not with respect to usability and efficiency). -- Yeah well, my daddy can beat up your daddy!
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Yes! I can't live without 4NT[^]. The filename completion and lots of extra built-in commands make life a lot easier. Heck, I even still have the DOS NU tools in my path (like ts - text search in file). They don't show LFNs but I don't care. ;) I think you need to lower your age guess to 25 though. ;P --Mike-- Ericahist | CP SearchBar v2.0.2 | Homepage | RightClick-Encrypt | 1ClickPicGrabber #include "witty-quote.h"
Wow. I just looked up 4NT and discovered that it costs money. Has it always been like that? IIRC, 4DOS was shareware on DOS (some features disabled). -- Yeah well, my daddy can beat up your daddy!
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Yes! I can't live without 4NT[^]. The filename completion and lots of extra built-in commands make life a lot easier. Heck, I even still have the DOS NU tools in my path (like ts - text search in file). They don't show LFNs but I don't care. ;) I think you need to lower your age guess to 25 though. ;P --Mike-- Ericahist | CP SearchBar v2.0.2 | Homepage | RightClick-Encrypt | 1ClickPicGrabber #include "witty-quote.h"
Michael Dunn wrote: Yes! I can't live without 4NT[^]. Me, too. Additionally, I have defined myriads of aliases to easen my daily work. Regards Thomas
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Wow. I just looked up 4NT and discovered that it costs money. Has it always been like that? IIRC, 4DOS was shareware on DOS (some features disabled). -- Yeah well, my daddy can beat up your daddy!
It's always been payware as long as I can remember. --Mike-- Ericahist | CP SearchBar v2.0.2 | Homepage | RightClick-Encrypt | 1ClickPicGrabber "That probably would've sounded more commanding if I wasn't wearing my yummy sushi pajamas." -- Buffy
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I'm thinking about posting a handful of articles on tools only of interest to those of us who live in console windows. The question, of course, is whether it's worth it. How many of you live with one or more command prompts open and use them for a significant part of your work? Certainly this has faded out over the years - are there any younger than say 35-40 who do this? -- -Blake (com/bcdev/blake)
Blake Coverett wrote: How many of you live with one or more command prompts open and use them for a significant part of your work? Certainly this has faded out over the years - are there any younger than say 35-40 who do this? I do and I am 31, however I have been programming since I was 8. I always have several 4nt windows open and I do most of my batch builds from there. I modified the vc autobuild sample so that I can batch build VC6 workspaces from the command line. There are also many things that are much faster from the command line like deleting files or how about a recursively deleting all .bak files in a tree. Thats quite a pain in the GUI and simple in the command window. Also I think of the times I need to process 100,000 or more medical images in a batch. Doing this with the GUI is very slow and cumbersome... I can write a one or two line 4nt script to execute all I need and if the parameters change I can repeat the whole batch with a new set of parameters. John
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I just have to add that I find it ironic that any programmer could have such a dim view of the command console. I a very high level, but definitely real sense all programs are just glorified batch scripts compiled into binary form. I've seen a few pure GUI based scripting tools out there and I can't think of one of them that has caught on to the same level as all these "old" text based programming languages. Seriously, a script or command line interface gives the user a level of automation flexability that a graphical interface can't match. The whole advantage of the GUI is that it presents a subset of possible user interactions in a clear easy to interpret screen. It's limit is that there is a finte amount of space which limits the number of commands presented to the user.