Executive Summary:
Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system (OS) includes a host of command-line tools to help you administer your systems. Here are the commands you need to modify your boot configuration, manage access control lists (ACLs), perform backups and system assessments, and other useful functions.
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The lion’s share of the attention to Windows Vista
always seems to center around the new interface,
which is understandable considering its exciting
new look and feel. Unfortunately, part of the attention is
because you now have to find new ways of doing old tasks.
However, new features in Vista don’t end with the UI.
Under the covers, Vista also sports command-line tools—many of them new—that make a powerful addition to
your administrative toolbox. Here are my favorites.
10. Bcdedit—The days of editing the simple
boot.ini file are gone. Vista’s new boot
process saves its system boot configuration
in the Boot Configuration Data
(BCD) store. Like all bad ideas, the BCD store replaces a
simple concept with a complex albeit more secure one.
Bcdedit is your primary tool for editing the BCD store.
Bcdedit supports a wide set of command-line options.
For instance, to list the contents of the store you can run
bcdedit /enum
9. Choice—A handy batch-file command, choice
lets you display a list of choices to users of a
command-shell script. The choice command
returns an index value in the ERRORLEVEL
environment variable indicating the user’s selection. For
example, the following command prompts users to enter
Y, N, or C; the ERRORLEVEL variable returns 1, 2, or 3
respectively:
CHOICE /C YNC /M “Press Y, N, or C.”
8. Waitfor—The waitfor command is a useful
scripting command that synchronizes processes
running on multiple systems on the network.
As its name suggests, waitfor can pause a
script until the command processor receives a specified
signal, and it can also send a signal to one or more systems
on the network. The following command waits for
the ScriptDone signal:
waitfor ScriptDone
7. Wbadmin—Although you might not have a
clue based on its name, the new wbadmin command
is Vista’s command-line backup tool. The
following example shows how to use wbadmin
to backup the C and D drives to the share named backup
on myserver:
wbadmin start backup -backupTarget:\\myserver backup include:c:,d:
6. Icacls—The Icacls command replaces the older
cacls command. Icacls lets you list, update, and
back up the access control lists (ACLs) for files
and directories. The following example shows
how you can save the ACLs for the C:\temp directory:
icacls c:\temp /save tempacl
5. Winsat—Winsat is the new Windows System
Assessment tool. It runs automatically when
you install Vista, but you can run it on demand
for simple system benchmarking and system
information. For instance, to list your system information,
you could run winsat with the features parameter:
winsat features
4. Clip—The new clip command is a handy tool
that copies the output of other command-line
tools to the clipboard. The following example
shows how to use clip to copy the contents of
the file mytext.txt to the clipboard:
clip < mytext.txt.
3. Forfiles—The forfiles command is another useful
batch-file tool. It executes a command over
a set of files. Forfiles is much easier to use than
the older and more obtuse for command. The
following example shows how you could list all files more
than 30 days old in the c:\temp directory:
forfiles /p c:\temp /s /d -30 /c “cmd /c echo @file
2. WinRS—The WinRS tool is essentially the Windows
version of Linux’s Secure Shell (SSH).
WinRS lets you open a secure command window
to a remote host. All the contents of the remote
shell are encrypted. The following example connects to
the server named myserver and runs the dir command:
winrs -r:myserver dir
1. Robocopy—Without a doubt, the best commandline
addition to Vista is robocopy. Although robocopy
isn’t new to most of our readers (it’s been a staple in the
Windows Resource Kit for years), Vista is the first release
that includes robocopy as a part of the OS. Robocopy is a
super-powerful command-line copy tool. The following
example shows how to create a mirrored copy of the directory
called shares and all of its subfolders.
robocopy “C:\Shares” “\\server2\ Shares Backup” /MIR /R:2 /NP