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I am an ardent admirer of console commands. For a very fast execution of the most simple tasks, I rely on cmd. About an year back I saw my tech architect using Grep on windows. Until then I didn’t know how effective it could be on Windows platform. At that very moment I downloaded unix-utilities for windows. I have realized its power many times in my profession. Very often it is required to find a few pieces of information from a pile of XML logs occupying around 20 Megs on my system. I wonder if I could have done it if I were not having the power of unix on windows. A variety of utilities are available for most of the tasks. Undoubtedly, my favourite is grep because of its splendid blend of simplicity and power.

I like powershell too, but for simple tasks it seems like an overkill. I am not an expert of powershell but for simple task of finding some information recursively, I think grep is great. The command is simple and execution is very fast.

With the evolution of powershell, it seems micrososft is empowering users with powerful console commands. WMI is good but still it was not a general purpose scripting platform. Powershell leverages both its potential for managing windows and perform quick one line commands. I like a few of the commandlets available in powershell like “ps” is a quick way to dump all the available processes with relevant information. Powershell becomes really fun when one has the PowerShellPlus which is an interactive scripting environment for powershell which also has intellisense support.

If you do not like default appearance and behaviour of Command prompt, which has not changed much since the DOS era, then go for Console. It is an excellent piece of open source creativity which gives better control on command prompt as Linux users have always enjoyed. It allows multiple tabbed console prompts, coloured background with custom picture and true alpha blending.

Please share your experiences and suggestions.