David Kline : Command Line

Quick Creation of Text Files From the Command Line

DavidKlineMS — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 11:06:00 GMT

It's a sunny day here in the Seattle area, so let's have some command line fun. :)

Have you ever needed to create a small text file while working at a command line? I've been using the following technique since my MS-DOS days.

Creating files at the command line is very simple, using the copy command. Here's how:

While in a Command Prompt window, navigate to your desired folder. I will use c:\test in this example.
C:\> cd test
Instruct the copy command to copy the console (CON) data to your file (ex: notes.txt)
C:\test> copy con notes.txt
Type your desired text
This is a simple file created via the copy command
Save the file using Ctrl+Z and pressing the Enter key
The console window will show the following
^Z 1 file(s) copied.

If you decide you do not wish to create the file, you can cancel using Ctrl+C and pressing the Enter key.

It is important to note that once you press the Enter key (on any line of your file), it is not possible to go back and make changes. For this reason, for any file longer than a line or two, I don't recommend this technique. I suggest using Notepad or your favorite text editor instead.

I was searching the Microsoft Help and Support site while writing this and found the following additional tip:

Appending a Line to a File with COPY Con or ECHO

This tip is extremely cool if what you are looking to do is add a line or two to an existing file.

Enjoy!
-- DK

Disclaimer(s):
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

What was that cool thing you just did? - Addendum: Clearing the command history

DavidKlineMS — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 22:59:00 GMT

I was at a retirement party recently when, as often happens, talk turned to the "old days". I was talking to one of the attendees about doskey and how useful it still is. He asked, "Have you ever used Alt+F7?". I had to admit that I hadn't. When I got back from the party, I gave it a quick try.

I must say that I have found another command line time saver. For those who read my original doskey post, you will remember that I'm quite fond of using F7 / F9 to navigate through my command history. Anyone who has worked in a Command Prompt window for a significant amount of time will notice that the command history can get lengthy at times.

How does Alt+F7 help with this? It clears the command history for the current Command Prompt window. I think of Alt+F7 as doskey's version of the cls (clear screen) command.

Now, whenever I find myself scrolling through a command history that has grown too long, I use Alt+F7 and retype the command(s) that I need (which are now conviniently a brief scroll away).

Enjoy!
-- DK

Disclaimer(s):
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Saving time when navigating directories at the Command Prompt using pushd and popd

DavidKlineMS — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 23:36:00 GMT

It's been a little while since I posted one of my favorite command line 'tricks'...

Windows XP (NT/2000/2003/etc) has two commands (pushd and popd) that save me huge amounts of time when navigating my machine's file system from a Command Prompt window. What these handy commands do is to create a virtual stack where you can use to store where you have been and quickly return as needed. This directory stack is structured First In-Last Out (FILO), so if you push several directories and wish to return to the origin, you will need to pop each one off of the stack, in reverse order, until you are back to the start -- at which time the stack will be empty.

A very handy use of pushd is to wrap it with a cd (chdir) command in a doskey macro to create a custom command that changes the current directory while remembering where you started -- this is how I most often use pushd.

The doskey command reference (see the Microsoft Windows XP - Command-line reference link, below) states that you can create macros consisting of multiple commands as shown below
c:\>doskey tools=pushd .$tcd /d c:\tools

Please note that while the above illustrates using doskey to register a single macro, you can store all of your macros in one file and load them all at once using
doskey /macrofile <filename>

While this is a handy feature, the example above will result in two prompts being shown (one each for the pushd and the cd commands)
C:\Documents and Settings>tools

C:\Documents and Settings> c:\tools>

That can get a little confusing, and clutters up the Command Prompt window a bit. To avoid the 'double prompting', I create a batch file (cdpush.bat) that disables echo before does the pushd and cd commands
@echo off pushd . cd /d %1

The @ sign in front of echo causes cmd.exe (and command.com in MS-DOS) to suppress the echoing of the command to the screen. The /d argument to the cd command allows it to change the drive as well as the directory.

The new tools macro now gets declared as
c:\>doskey tools=cdpush.bat c:\tools

Now, using our macro looks like this
C:\Documents and Settings>tools

c:\tools>

Much cleaner, and you can use this batch file in other macros to change to any directory (with a pushd of your current location).

To return to my previous directory (at the top of the virtual stack) I type
c:\tools>popd

And I am back to where I started
C:\Documents and Settings>

Another place where pushd and popd are handy is in batch files that need to change your current directory. The Microsoft Windows XP - Command-line reference A-Z provides a very nice example.

Enjoy!
-- DK

[Edit(s): fix formatting]

Disclaimer(s):
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

What was that cool thing you just did?

DavidKlineMS — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 20:12:00 GMT

Back when I started at Microsoft, the big product was MS-DOS 5. Of all the features in MS-DOS 5, my hands down favorite (and one I still use today) was DosKey. You remember DosKey... It was the utility that made F7 one of the most useful keys on your keyboard.

Prior to starting here, I was a MS-DOS 3.x and 4.01 user (depending on whether I was at home or in the lab at school) and became pretty comfortable with the command line interface. To this day, one of the first things I do after booting my PC is to launch a command prompt.

Every so often, someone will stop by my office while I'm working and ask me "What did you just do? That was cool." The "what" was pressing F7 from within a Command Prompt window.

Re-typing short commands is easy and quick, once the commands get lengthy (to me, that means 30+ characters), using the F7 key is a real time saver. Just scroll through the list, when you find your desired command, press the Enter key and you're finished.

This even works inside of many command line utilities (ex: cordbg)!

Happily, DosKey lives on. My F7 key still gets it's daily workout and I can still create and use custom command line macros. For more information on DosKey in Windows XP, check out the docs here. Scroll down for the list of shortcut keys. Scroll a little further for macro syntax.

Have fun!
--DK

[Edit: Fix sentence structure]

Disclaimer(s):
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Building a simple NetCF application from the command line - VB.NET version

DavidKlineMS — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 02:55:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago, I promised to post the VB.NET equivalent to my C# command line example. Today, I'm going to show you how to do the same thing with the VB.NET command line compiler. In the C# post, I suggested adding the following environment variable to your sdkvars.bat file:

set NETCFLIBS="c:\program files\microsoft.net\sdk\v2.0\compactframework\windowsce"

I reference the same environment variable in the example shown below.

This example builds a very simple VB.NET application which makes use of Windows Forms and Web Services. As with the C# example, the non-bold portions of this example are the source file and resulting executable name.

vbc.exe /noconfig /netcf /nostdlib /target:exe /sdkpath:%NETCFLIBS% /r:mscorlib.dll /r:system.dll
/r:system.drawing.dll /r:system.windows.forms.dll /r:system.web.services.dll /r:Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll
/out:SimpleApp.exe Module1.vb

For details regarding the command line switches, please use vbc /?.

/sdkpath
This handy switch allows you to shorten each one of the /r (short for /reference) switches to just the name of the assembly (rather than the more cumbersome fully qualified assembly path).

Well, that's all for today... enjoy!
-- DK

Disclaimers:
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Some of the information contained within this post may be in relation to beta software. Any and all details are subject to change.

Building a simple NetCF application from the command line - C# version

DavidKlineMS — Wed, 18 Aug 2004 04:21:00 GMT

Now that NetCF is part of the .NET Framework v2 SDK, I get asked how to build applications using the command line tools. Today I'm going to show how to build a simple (single source file) C# application using csc.exe.

For more complicated applications (more than one source file, building DLL assemblies at the same time as your application, including resources, etc), I recommend creating a makefile and using nmake.exe (or your favorite make system).

To make your life simpler, I suggest creating an environment variable to store the path to the .NET Compact Framework assemblies (mscorlib.dll, system.dll, etc). The default path (as installed by Visual Studio or the SDK) is long and can get cumbersome to retype for each assembly you reference. On my machine, I set the environment variable is as follows:

set NETCFLIBS="c:\program files\microsoft.net\sdk\v2.0\compactframework\windowsce"

You can add this line to your sdkvars.bat file (typically installed in c:\program files\microsoft.net\sdk\v2.0\bin) so that it gets set every time you run the .NET Framework SDK Command Prompt. Also, be sure to use quotation marks around the path. Since the default path contains a space, forgetting the quotes will cause the command line compiler to fail to find your assembly references.

Once NETCFLIBS has been set, you can build your application from within the .NET Framework SDK Command Prompt quite easilly. The example below shows the command line to build a single source file WinForms application that uses Web Services. In this example, the non-bold text specifies your source file and the name of the resulting executable.

csc.exe /noconfig /nostdlib /target:exe /out:SimpleApp.exe /r:%NETCFLIBS%\mscorlib.dll /r:%NETCFLIBS%\system.dll /r:%NETCFLIBS%\system.drawing.dll /r:%NETCFLIBS%\system.windows.forms.dll /r:%NETCFLIBS%\system.web.services.dll Form1.cs

You can use csc /? to decipher the compiler switches, but a couple bear mentioning.

/noconfig
This switch instructs the compiler to not include the default response file (csc.rsp). This file, if present, sets a handful of default switches for the compiler that are not applicable when building NetCF applications.

/nostdlib
This switch instructs the compiler to not include it's standard list of references. When building NetCF projects, you need to use the .NET Compact Framework assemblies and not those of the desktop framework.

Forgetting to include either of these switches will generate compile time errors regarding duplicate references.

I hope this helps you get your C# applications building! I plan to have a Visual Basic.NET equivalent command line posted sometime in the not too distant future.

Take care,
-- DK