Subscriber and regular correspondent Ivan Tadej wrote recently to say:
Hello Terry, this is a bit delayed response to your last newsletter-issue [October 15th - Terry]…You see, after re-reading it a few days ago (re-reading the last issue of your newsletter, in particular the “/*5. COMMAND vs CMD*/” entry on the http://www.terryscomputertips.com/archives/news_20061015_3.php page), I thought to let you know about the small and efficient program that I am using instead of a “cmd.exe” program. This commandline-shell alternative that I am talking about is an application from Gammadyne site called “*Greg’s DOS Shell*”: http://www.gammadyne.com/cmdline.htm#gs. It’s a 172 KB in-size “cmd.exe” replacement, which remembers previously executed commands during the current session for future sessions (and stores them as a “history” of commands in an .ini file for easier editing), while this is especially useful for 9x systems with their crippled “command.com” program.
From the program’s home-page:
/GS.EXE is an alternative DOS shell, with better editing features than the ancient DOS command prompt which Micro$oft has never bothered to improve. Pressing the left arrow key does not perform a backspace, it lets you go back and change something without destroying everything that came after it. Pressing the up and down arrow keys will cycle through a history of past commands (including commands from a previous session). Pressing the insert key will toggle the editing mode between “insert” and “overwrite”. Ctrl+V will paste the clipboard into the command line./
Thanks for the suggestion Tadej. I haven’t tried this alternative, yet, but some of the Windows 98 and Windows Me users might be interested.
As I wrote in the October 15th issue, Windows XP has a much-improved command shell (cmd.exe) as opposed to Win98/WinME’s command.com shell (which wasn’t originally available in WinXP).
I often use the command line for small tasks that would be much harder, or more tedious, to do in the standard XP GUI (graphical user interface).
and