I found this very useful because, it takes you to required directory immediately without the need for opening a command prompt from start->Run and changing to required directory using cd command. This option enables you to right-click on any folder in windows explorer and select “Command Prompt”; this opens up a command prompt with that folder as your current directory.

What you need to do to get this option?:

It’s very simple, follow any of the below procedures…

A) Manual procedure
Well, you need to have administrator rights to do below registry modifications and I warn you to little bit careful while working on registry because, any improper modifications will lead to registry corruption.

1. Open registry editor(start -> Run -> Type regedit)
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Classes/Folder/Shell
3. Create a new key named “Command prompt here..”.
4. Create a key named “command” under “under newly created above key and set the default value to “cmd.exe /k pushd %1”
5. Close regedit

B) Automated procedure

Run the following command and it will get the things configured for you 🙂

C:>reg add “HKLMSoftwareClassesFolderShellCommand Prompt here…command”
/ve /t REG_SZ /d “cmd.exe /k pushd %1”

The operation completed successfully

C:>

Now you right click on any folder and you will observe additional option “Command prompt here…” selecting which results in opening a new command prompt window with current directory as the one you selected. Look at the below screen shot.

If you want to put your own customized name in context menu, then replace “Command Prompt here..” with your own text.

The general practices for capturing the command output from command prompt are…

a) Type the command -> capture the output as shown in below window

b) Using redirection
ex: c:>ipconfig /all > ipdetails.txt

Though both the above mentioned methods seems simple, there is another simplest way to capture the command output to clip board using the clip.exe command. After copying to clipboard, you can copy it to some text file or mail or into any other program.

Usage:

This command places the output of ipconfig command to clipboard. This way is pretty useful when the output you need to capture is very long and command . Clip captures the output regardless of if it is information or error message or output. What ever is the output it simply places into clipboard

Note:Clip command is available by default in windows 2003. If you want to use this in Windows XP, you need to copy clip.exe from windows 2003 server to c:windows directory on XP machine. This is also available for download.

In day-to-day windows administration we generally come across many error codes in eventlogs and application specific logs. The error codes generally will be in hex form. We have to search in internet to find the meaning of that error and to troubleshoot further.

Microsoft has provided a good error code look-up tool(err.exe) which simplifies the life of windows administrator. It’s a command line tool and we need to pass the error message as command line argument to err.exe and it displays the text explaining the meaning of error message. I found it as very helpful for me to troubleshoot the things and I hope it helps you too 🙂

Syntax:

C:>err [value] [value]…

where must be of one of the following forms:

• Decorated hex (0x54f)
• Implicit hex (54f)
• Ambiguous (1359)
• Exact string (=ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR)
• Substring (:INTERNAL_ERROR)

Download it from Microsoft site. Though it says for exchange, it will work for most of the Win32 error codes.

Happy learning…
Sitaram Pamarthi