The power of CMD.EXE commands

The Tech forum

In today’s world of Wizards, Automated Installation Programs, object oriented programming and GUI-based applications, do you still remember the DOS prompt?

Of course on the Windows OS now, it is replaced with CMD.EXE. But do you still remember the batch files we used to write? Do you still write some batch files? Whether you do or you don’t I am sure you will find this content very useful and appealing.

While exploring the online help available for these commands, we came across many gems which, we felt, were worth sharing with all of you.

What is the relevance of this in today’s world? The idea is simple — we often tend to do complex, multi-step, GUI-based tasks, which could have been completed in a fraction of time if you knew the nuances of these commands.

So read on.

First steps

Just to start off on the right track, start a command prompt by typing cmd in the Run command dialog.

Now type

cmd /? > learn.txt

What does this do? The /? Parameter outputs help about CMD itself. The > sign outputs it to ‘learn.txt’. Now open this text file and browse through it in Notepad.

A quick glance will tell you that there is lot of functionality and in-depth thinking in something as ignored as CMD.EXE

Please notice that it supports Unicode – something you may not even have expected it to do.

The bottomline is that although the CMD.EXE may behave like good old DOS, it is much more than that.

Executing files

In the Start – Run dialog, we are used to just specifying URLs or Filenames. Windows is able to understand which application should open these by default. For example if you type ‘sample.doc’, Windows finds out that you need to actually start Word and pass this filename as a parameter to it.

In CMD if you do this, it would simply say “sample.doc”. It will start Word exactly like it did in Windows Run command.

In some cases, like URLs this may not work by default. To make even a URL work as expected, type the command as follows:

start www.maestros.net

Now, you will think that is all there is to the start command. You are thoroughly mistaken.

Just for your info, here is what you get when you type

start /?

Please note that it says “Press any key to continue…”

I did. It shows 4 more screens of information – about a single command Start! Check out how much you are missing. Anyway, I leave it to you to explore the Start command options.

One great thing to note that this command allows you to control the process level execution priority right at the outset. Usually when we run Windows commands from the Windows UI, we first run the applications and then change it using task manager (I hope you know how to do this!)

Another thing to know is when to run which command in which priority. Unfortunately, if I do this here, we will go into another big topic and never return to the CMD.EXE. So I will leave it till some future article.

Executing multiple commands together without writing a batch file

Suppose you want to run few commands one after the other. But each command takes a long time to complete. What do you do? You type first command, wait for it to finish, then type the next command and so on.

Of course you could have written a batch file. But then you don’t want to re-execute these commands in future. So why waste the time in writing a batch file.

Here is a simple way of achieving this.

Suppose you want to run two commands one after the other, but you want to type them all at once – without writing a batch file. The commands are, for example, ‘dir’ then ‘cd ..’ and then ‘echo %path%’

Here is how you go about doing it.

Type the opening bracket first and then press the Enter key. The system will prompt you for more. Now on each line type a new complete command and press Enter for the next command.

Finally, write the closing bracket and press Enter. That’s it.

If any of the command generates error, the further commands will still run. This may be a problem in some cases. If you want commands to run only if the prior one has run without an error, there is a way.

Conditional execution

Taking on from the previous section, what if you want conditional execution of commands? First of all how do you know if any command generated an error or completed successfully.

There is an environment variable called errorlevel which contains this information. This variable contains a value which is updated based upon the execution of the last command. If there was no error the value is zero. If there was a problem the value will be non-zero. It is possible to put a custom number into the errorlevel variable to indicate specific type of error conditions. Usually, the value is 1 if there is any error.

Now, we have a command called If which can check the value of errorlevel after the previous command execution and then run the next command.

But there is a much simpler way available.

Suppose you want to run the first command DIR and then if DIR is successful, run another command called Echo “Successful”. How do you do this? Simply type the following:

Dir *.* && Echo Successful

The && operator allows us to have conditional execution capability. The command && executes only if the command before it runs successfully (errorlevel = 0).

Now, you may want to handle the failure of the first command by running a third command. How do you do this? That is also thought of !

Dir fdsafs && echo successful || echo failed

Note that the pipe symbol ( | ) is used twice. Here I have used a filename which did not exist in the directory. Therefore, the DIR command fails with a ‘File not found’ error. Therefore, the “echo failed” command executes. This is how, we have a very powerful if – then – else kind of functionality.

Now let us take a look at a more usable and practical example. This example assumes Windows XP as the OS. Please note, the text marked in ‘bold’ is not to be typed. These are prompts from the OS. Please note, the commands continue on a single line (without pressing Enter) between the More prompts.

C:\Documents and Settings\nitin>xcopy c:\upload\*.* \\backupserver\aug2004 && (

More? eventcreate /t information /id 999 /l Application /d “Copy succeeded” /so “my batch copy process”

More? ) || (

More? eventcreate /t error /id 998 /l Application /d “Copy failed. Please retry” /so “my batch copy process”

More? net send administrator “Batch copy has problems.”

More? )

What are we doing here? We are running a commonly run, long, batch process here. If it succeeds or fails we are logging an event into the event viewer and then sending a command to administrator if it fails.

Note that with failure we have used two commands. Impressive, is it not?

Now, how did we log errors in the eventviewer? Did you know about the command called EventCreate? Yes. This is also one of the many powerful command line utilities available with Windows XP and Windows 2003.

More on such useful commands next time.

About the Author:Dr Nitin Paranjape is the Chairman and MD of Maestros (Mediline). He is a consultant with many organisations, covering appropriate technology utilisation, business application of relevant technology, application architecture and audit as well as knowledge transfer. He has authored more than 650 articles on various technology-related subjects. He can be contacted at nitin@mediline.co.in