I’ve been revisiting an old friend from the days of DOS and ancient versions of Windows. I had forgotten how much work this friend did for me. The more I thought about it, and the more I caught up with this friend, the more I realized there is a entirely new generation of system administrators that have never met him.<\/p>\n
My old friend is DosKey. DosKey was one of the earliest automation tools and I think it’s still got some legs. Now before you jump to any age-ist conclusions, you need to see what he can still do. If you are like me, you spend a lot of time at a command prompt. I really hate typing and am always in a hurry. I also dislike having to reach for a mouse and navigating my increasingly complex Start Menu. With DosKey, if I want to start Microsoft Excel, all I need to do is type xl. It doesn’t matter what directory I’m in. Nor does the application I’m starting have to be in the path. All I need to do is to define a doskey macro at the command line by typing:<\/p>\n
doskey xl=”%programfiles%\\Microsoft Office\\Office11\\Excel.exe” $1 $2 $3 $4 $5<\/span><\/p>\n You can use variables like $1 and $2 (all the way up to $9) much like you would use %1 and %2 in a batch file. In this situation, from a command prompt I can type xl file1.xls file2.xls file3.xls and have Excel open all three files. Sure, with file association if I type file1.xls, Excel will open. My macro lets me open multiple files with a single,easy command. And what if I want to open a file with a different application?<\/p>\n CSV files (at least for me) are associate with Excel. If I type testusers.csv at a command prompt, Excel will launch the file. But what if I want Notepad? Well I can save a few keystrokes (they do add up) with a macro like this:<\/p>\n doskey np=Notepad.exe $1 $2 $3 $4 $5<\/span><\/p>\n With this macro loaded, I can run np testusers.csv<\/span> at a command prompt and the file will open in Notepad.<\/p>\n To see what macros are loaded into memory type<\/p>\n doskey \/macros<\/span><\/p>\n I can create a doskey macro to execute any command or series of commands. Suppose I always use \/all when I run ipconfig. That’s too much typing. I’d rather have a macro called ip that does the work for me.<\/p>\n doskey <\/span>ip=ipconfig \/all<\/span><\/p>\n Now at a command prompt I can simply type ip<\/span>. <\/p>\n I did a MCPMag.com TipSheet column <\/a>on some of my favorite one-line expressions. They can be defined as DosKey macros. I also took some one-liners from a helpful reader’s followup <\/a>and added macros like these:<\/p>\n