CF: Okay.
SH: So, then you are off doing some stuff and then you go and say, popd just popd and then hit enter.

CF: Cool!
SH: This is actually a stack of directories where you have been. So you know how a lot of people write batch files, they keep track of where they are, and you have to go cd.., cd../..

CF: Yeah.
SH: You do all this dancing. With PushD and PopD sometimes you just want to go back to where you were.

CF: Great!
SH: Now the cool tip on top of that is setting your command prompt differently and the Craig AnDera turned me onto this and I've got this up at http://shrinkster.com/dpn. You know how people used to customize their command prompts in the DOS days?

CF: Right.
SH: You can still do it now. If you, say, set prompt equals $p refuse path $_, where _ means new line,$+, + is going to tell you the depth you are in the stack, and then $g again - all this is up at http://shrinkster.com/dpn. You type this prompt, you will actually get a + sign right before the > you are used to seeing. That will show you how deep in the PushD stack you are.

CF: No kidding.
SH: So then you can see a PushD. You will see a plus PushD again, you will see a second plus. This lets you write very robust batch files where you can get right back to where you were before and not have any trouble because you cd one too many times.

CF: Dude, that is sweet.
SH: Yeah, so big thanks to Craig Andera for that tip at http://shrinkster.com/dpn.

CF: That's awesome. I am going to use that tomorrow.
SH: Oh! This is what the Minutes is for, man. I am going to use that tomorrow. If I can change the life of just one child you are on the Minutes.

CF: Teach a man to fish.
SH: Yeah, dude, totally. And then number three because we are talking about moving around with directories and stuff. You just can't say enough nice things about tab completion, right? So, like we are down here at the command prompt and we are doing PushD and PopD and one of the things that just cannot help you too much is the tab completion stuff, right? We all remember early versions of Windows 2000 where we are going to the registry and set the tab completion character ourselves. But Patrick Caldwell reminded me today how many things tab completions can do for you. You give it just the slightest hint of what you want to do when you hit tab and they'll help you out. You type cddoc and you hit tab. It automatically puts in SQL and backslash documents and settings - all in quotes - all correct for you. And then of course shift tab gets you to the other options tab and shift tab. A lot of people think it's just a simple step forward to give you some auto-completion, but it's so much more. Also the depth of the wildcards that it will take. You can say *foo* and you can find a directories or files where foo is in the middle. Sometimes you don't have full wildcard support, but the stuff in the command line is just very well enabled for command lines where anything Dir understands, it will understand. So, yeah, if you use tab completion, but you don't think you really used it to the fullest, that alongside PushD, PopD, and a customized prompt can really make you a ninja at the command line.

CF: Absolutely.
SH: Number two. People may not think this is an appropriate number two, but I think it is because I am all about the big fonts, right? Changing your console font - how you can bring up a command line and you go and click in the upper left-hand corner there and say properties. You get a choice. You get this really lame choice between Lucida Console and then some bitmap fonts from 1985. You can control what goes in that font window. If you have got another mono type font that you really like, maybe the font that you use for programming with, you can modify the registry and get your own fonts in there. And I have got details at http://shrinkster.com/dpo. George Reilly actually expanded on that and made a registry key that makes it even easier. A registry file that you can run at http://shrinkster.com/dpp. So, a lot of people have been stealing like the Consolas font from the Longhorn disks or from Office 12. If you search for a programmer font on Google, there are a million different monos-based fonts, you know, you are not relegated just to Courier New. So I would encourage people to check out customizing their environment. I like to make my font - I use Consolas, I go black background on a green screen, I use a 24-point font because I want those dots to work for me, man, high dpi...

CF: Shiny.
SH: Very.

CF: And the number one cool utility and/or cool thing about Windows this week is...
SH: All the million other command-line utilities that you already have, but don't know about. I was writing up a list of these myself and I went up to Google to check on one of them and discovered http://shrinkster.com/dpq, which is a list of all of the crazy utilities you have never heard of that exist already on your system including ones that aren't documented.

CF: Now, these aren't things that you have to download, these are already...
SH: No, these are already on your system. You have these now. So, once you go out to command line and we will do them together here. So, the first one is fsutil File System Util. All sorts of things about managing the volumes, managing your disks, file-specific commands, file system information, file system behavior.

CF: Now these are guaranteed to exist on what?
SH: On Windows XP and 2003. Yeah, like, for example, it might be something as simple as 'fsutil fsinfo drives,' gives you a list of all of your current drives, that's pretty simple. But there are lots of different other things like fsutil, fsinfo, volume info you get details about, all of your different drives whether or not they support case sensitivity. Whether or not they support Unicode in their file names, whether or not they support ACLs, whether they support compression, it's a capability querier of your file system, fsutil. These are all things you can put into your batch files and your various utilities because you can count on these being there all the time.

So, here's another crazy one, if you go to your command line and you type eudcedit, this is a thing called the Private Character Editor, eudcedit, this is actually a weird - I had no idea this was on my system. This is the utility that you could actually build your own font from. It's a Private Character Editor. So not really sure quite why it is useful or interesting, there are lots of other font-building tools, but I always find it creepy to know my machine completely and then discover an application that I had no idea existed and this one has a full UI for editing fonts.
It's crazy.

CF: Wow! Wow!
SH: Yeah, totally. Some useful stuff that you can use on, like, your mom's machine or a machine you come upon that may be buggered up as you can type sfc - it's the System File Checker. This is the thing that will go through all of your Windows-protected system files and it will basically overwrite and replace the "incorrect versions" with Microsoft versions. So, if you think that you have got a machine that's been compromised or has got an invalid driver on it or somehow has become corrupted, sfc is a tool you can use to scan your system either on boot or scan immediately and potentially bring it back from the brink. And then within the context of drivers, if you type driverquery - just one word driverquery - from the command line, you will get a complete list of all of the drivers that are running on your system. And there are all sorts of things if you type 'driverquery/?' that lets you basically enumerate and list all the different installed device drivers and their properties and even put them as a csv file. Couple of other quick utilities disk part is a disk-partitioning tool, another kind of hidden command line that you can use. Very dangerous, don't hurt yourself.

CF: Yep. Use that one.
SH: Openfiles apparently will let you see all of the different files that are open on your shares. And you can enable your local file tracking so you can see all the open files on your system currently.

CF: Awesome.
SH: So Service Control is like a net stop or net start on steroids that lets you manage services and control services from the command line. And then the last one that I thought was kind of cool is getmac. Lets you basically get the Mac address. I always do ipconfig/all, but now getmac just does it and tells you the status of those particular interfaces. Pretty cool stuff.

CF: That is sweet.
SH: That's our number one thing - a million other command-line utilities that you already have.

CF: Very cool, Scott. Anything else?
SH: Yeah, so I wanted to give a shout out. I saw a pretty interesting site that Jonathan Goodyear's company is putting up called http://email2face.com and this is a pretty clever idea. I am not sure how they are going to get everyone in the entire universe to put their e-mail addresses and faces up there but they are basically storing a mapping between your e-mail address and your face. So, you go up there you add a small icon of your face - maybe the one you use for your instant messenger and I think that they can probably come up with some cool and creative ways to integrate this with Outlook or different messaging tools when you have an e-mail address and you just want to see that person's face, you know how Outlook's context form lets you put their face in? It would be pretty slick to have like a Web Services interface or maybe like just the simple HTTP get where I could get someone's face from their e-mail address. So check out email2face.

CF: It's not a real security risk because it's not so high-resolution that it's any sort of software.
SH: Yeah, it's not like email2head shot.

CF: Yeah, it's not email2highresretinalscan.
SH: Exactly, email2fingerprint, although I have got that idea all patented right now.

(Laughter)

CF: Scott, this has been a fabulous show. Thank you so much. Great stuff as always. And makes me wonder how many more of these shows you have got. I mean, there's a finite number of cool things in the world.
SH: Is there, is there, Carl?

CF: We'll have to wait and see.
SH: Who hurt you, Carl Franklin, who hurt you? (Laughter). Oh! I think I have got a few more in me.

CF: All right, until next week, this is Carl Franklin [and] Scott Hanselman, saying thanks for listening to Hanselminutes and have a great week.