"Wayne Watson" <sierra_mtnv...@sbcglobal.net> wrote
My assumption was is was fully a DOS window.
No its a DOS window on steroids!
Thee are a ton of improvements to the DOS shell in XP
most of which are turned off by default.
Take half an hour to go through the help screens for CMD
and turn on the various registry settings it mentions to
access its full power. (Type HELP CMD at the prompt)
Trying to work my way to folder was a bit daunting,
Cut n paste of the path works, but you can also use tab
to complete the file name which speeds things up considerably.
(And recall that with QuickEdit turned on you can easily cut n paste
from the CMD window itself)
Now the problem became one of typing in the name of the
program each time it was to be executed.
Even on DOS F3 repeated the last command but
on XP (and indeed since Win95) you can use up/down arrow
to step back through the command history. And you can
set it to remember the history betweeen sessions (although
I don't personally do that...) I think you can also search
back through the history but I don't use that very often
and I'm maybe confusing it with cygwin/bash!
This works inside the python prompt in a CMD window too.
Other tricks include environment variable expansion good
for HOME, PATH, etc
Definitely worth spending some time reading the HELP on
the enhanced CMD features.
--
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/
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