Friday, December 19, 2003 2:11 PM
szurgot
Start - My favorite, and yet, most annoying windows command
Update: It seems this post looked fine in the editor, but messed up in the feed, so violated blog etiquiette. I've correct the formatting so it should show up correctly.
One of the commands I used most in Windows is the “start” command from the command prompt. It allows you to do several quick things, like
"start ." - Opens up the current directory in an explorer window
"start DIR" - Opens up the specified directory an an explorer window
"start FILE" - Opens up the specified file in the appropriate handler
"start /WAIT EXE" - Executes the given exe and waits for it to complete. (Great for scripting GUIs)
Needless to say, combined with Commond Completion in the console, this is a quick way to zip around the system.
But, it's got an interesting feature. If the first non-switch argument is quoted, that becomes the title of the new command prompt that is opened. The problem comes in that if there are spaces in the filename, the string is quoted, so you get a new command prompt instead of whatever you wanted. My guess is this is a backwards compatability issue, that's just been there forever. A quick batch file that just puts a ““ in the command line gets around it, so no big deal.
Anyway, great command if you use the command line and didn't know about it.