Windows Shell

15.11.2005

Over the years I had a lot of talks on various occastions with people that can be roughly divided into two groups. The first one is the "point and click admin" that has no concept of shell-driven administration or automated tasks made from combined shell tools. The second group, IMHO being slightly more arrogant in their attitude, is the "long-time *nix admin" that briefly utters a "Windows does not have a shell. Period."

While each point of view is right in some aspects, I would like to suggest that every admin and developer spends a rainy afternoon playing around with the Windows shell. From NT4 on (and especially with XP and 2003), this is a useful tool. It just takes a step aside to get things working sometimes and I am sure someone over there on Redmond had a lot of fun finding new names for common commands (like "tasklist" instead of "ps" - well they used "tlist" and a different syntax in NT4 and 2000). But in general you can accomplish a lot, as I wrote in my book about Windows Shell Scripting (this is a German book, but I still hope there will be an English version). To give you an idea, I have included an archive below that contains a subset of the ideas presented in the book. Did you know that you can get a list of processed for every open TCP/IP connections with the shell only? That it only takes a dozen line to have things like "uniq" or a script that extracts a word #n from line #m from a text file? Checking AD replication with DNS service records over the command line and much more. If you want to save time and your tools have to approved by the IT department (you know that "no strange tools from a much strnageer nerd site on the web"), you should give the shell a try.

If you get stuck in language problems (I am a native German speaker), send me an email and let me know. I'll do my best to help out on translation. Just download the file and try to figure out how the stuff works. I've included some comments, but no too much so you still have fun learning. During the holiday season I will post a number of samples with detailed comments just to proof my point that the shell acutally is one of the underestimated tools in Windows.

Download the archive (zip file, ~ 200K). I am working on the English translation of the pdf and the utilities documentation. If anybody had the time to assist me, that would be great, as our twelve week old daughter keeps us quite busy ...