In PowerShell I ran (dir *.exe).Count to see the number of executables in System32 folder in a Vista box and it prompty returned 401. So there are 401 executables and most of us are unaware of most of them.

Recently I wanted to copy the output of a console application to the clip board. I was on the verge of writing a program to do just that when I reminded myself of the programmers disease. After a bit of digging around I found the neat little clip.exe in the system32 folder.

d:\prithvi\Setup>clip /?

CLIP

Description:
    Redirects output of command line tools to the Windows clipboard.
    This text output can then be pasted into other programs.

Parameter List:
    /?                  Displays this help message.

Examples:
    DIR | CLIP          Places a copy of the current directory
                        listing into the Windows clipboard.

    CLIP < README.TXT   Places a copy of the text from readme.txt
                        on to the Windows clipboard.

So clip does what I was exactly looking for. Its a neat tool and I have grown fond of it. Guess how I pasted the output above. I ran clip /? | clip :-)