DOC Command prompt

fc - Free BeyondCompare in XP

FC is an advanced DOS Command that compares two files and displays the differences between them. Though the file comparison results are not as interactive as BeyondCompare or Altova DiffDog, fc is still very useful. You can even set fc to resynchronize the files after finding a mismatch.

tree - visual directory structure

You often need to take prints of your physical directory structure but XP has no simple “visual” commands for printing directory contents. Here, try the Tree DOS command and redirect the output to a text file.

find - advanced file search with filter

Find is the most powerful DOS command and even more useful than the Windows Desktop Search tool or the Windows Find Wizard. The find command searches for a specific string of text in a file or files. After searching the specified file or files, find displays any lines of text that contain the specified string. To search your hard disk to find and display the file names on drive C: that contain the string “Google” use the pipe (|) to direct the results of a dir command to find as follows: dir c:\ /s /b | find "Google"

command > file

Write standard output of command to file

command 1> file

Write standard output of command to file (same as previous)

command 2> file

Write standard error of command to file (OS/2 and NT)

command > file 2>&1

Write both standard output and standard error of command to file (OS/2 and NT)

commandA 2>&1 | commandB

Redirect standard output and standard error of commandA to standard input of commandB (OS/2 and NT)

ECHO “%~dp0”

Shows the batch file’s directory with trailing backslash (credits: Sean Brannery)

Call another program in the background

START