JPSoft Take Command/4NT

[Rover]

Hey Mouser,

Any luck getting a DC Discount from JPSoft?  I just visited their site and am fairly interested in Take Command.

For the uninitiated reading this... here's the link:
http://www.jpsoft.com/

While the Windows graphical interface is useful for simple tasks, the command line is often the best tool for system management, scripting, and other similar needs. 4NT and Take Command replace the crude utilities provided with Windows, giving you the most flexible and powerful command line available anywhere. Each of our products is a comprehensive command line tool designed to make the C:\> prompt truly productive, easy to use, and far more powerful. Each offer similar benefits -- major productivity enhancements to standard commands like COPY and DIR, over 100 new commands, improved command line editing, and thousands of other features for work at the command prompt. In addition, they are powerful batch file programming tools, providing extensions such as DO loops, error and exception handling, block-structured logic, a powerful integrated batch debugger, third-party plugins, and over 300 built-in variables and functions.  4NT and Take Command offer similar capabilities and features. They only differ based on whether they are a Console Mode or a Graphical User Interface (GUI) application.

  (pasted from CH&S)

[allen]

Wow, that sounds awesome -- I'd love to have an effective console under windows.  Get us a discount, Mouser!

[OGroeger]

Hm, i bought a license of the Suite some years ago but i don't use it. It turned out that the console itself was not 100% compatible with cmd.exe. IIRC the ant scripts failed with TC32, which made it senseless for me. A very nice feature is the autocompletion of windows shares, but this was not enough benefit for me. So my recommendation for you is if you want have  a more powerful console give bash a break. This is the standard console for most unixes, see http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/bash/, http://www.cygwin.com/, http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ and very interesting the coming up of Microsoft's  next generation command shell MSH http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.MSHWiki.

If you think of buying TC32 because of the programming aspects, you should keep cmd.exe and use vbscript which is much more powerful and available on every windows pc. Or use Python, Ruby, Perl ...

[Rover]

OGroeger - interesting thoughts.  I like and use bash on my linux systems, but just didn't consider it for Windoze.  I guess I like the all-in-one feel from Take Command.  I've looked at cygwin before and it just seems like overkill. 

Thanks for the links, I'll check 'em out. 

[OGroeger]

I agree. cygwin is overkill as it is far more than a console. It is a complete distribution.

A lot smaller is http://www.mingw.org/ with MSYS. This offers a minimal unix system. It is very interesting if you tend to compile cdrecord yourself.