14th March 2001
Windows 2000 is filled with more command line toys than you realize. I just hope some of them survive when we're forced to move to XP; there's something about that protection scheme that gives me the willies. Yes? No? Cancel? Ah, another message box asking me what I want to do. You know you could roll your own in W2k? Sure! Drop to the command prompt and run the "MSGBOX" utility. If you need assistance with interpreting the switch structure, trail the file name with a "/?" (sans quotes). Now you'll be creating message boxes left and right; use the ALT + PRINT SCREEN keyboard combo to copy the graphic to the clipboard; paste it into your favorite image editor and save it for later. Hey, remember back in the days when Windows wasn't so gooey? There's another tool that's still alive in W2k. TREE! That's right, you can run "TREE" from the command line and it'll show you the current path's hierarchical structure. Just as a reminder, any Windows user can redirect the output of any command line program to a text file. The syntax would appear something like this: "PROGRAM > TEXTFILE.TXT" (sans quotes). Useful, eh?