As a system admin with developer’s background, I like to write scripts utilizing command line tools to automate admin tasks. With the release of Windows Vista Beta 2, I was wondering about what new command line tools are available. I spent several hours yesterday to find out the new additions. Note that some of them are not “new” such as auditpol and robocopy. They were available as resource kit tools, but now they are part of Vista as default installation. Here is the list and their descriptions.
| auditpol | AuditPol.exe is a command-line tool used to modify audit polices from command line. |
| bcdedit | Boot Configuration Data Store Editor |
| bitsadmin | BITS administration utility. |
| change | Changes terminal server settings for logons, COM port mappings, and install mode. The following three commands are related to this one. |
| chglogon | Enable or disable session logins. eg: change logon . |
| chgport | List or change COM port mappings for DOS application compatibility. eg: change port . |
| chgusr | Change Install Mode. eg: change user . |
| choice | This tool allows users to select one item from a list of choices and returns the index of the selected choice. |
| clip | Redirects output of command line tools to the Windows clipboard. This text output can then be pasted into other programs. |
| cmdkey | Creates, displays, and deletes stored user names and passwords. |
| diskraid | Launches the Diskraid application. |
| dispdiag | Display Diagnostics |
| forfiles | Selects a file (or set of files) and executes a command on that file. This is helpful for batch jobs. |
| icacls | Updated version of cacls. Displays or modifies access control lists (ACLs) of files |
| iscsicli | Microsoft iSCSI Initiator |
| muiunattend | MUI Unattend Action |
| netcfg | WinPE Network Installer |
| ocsetup | Windows Optional Component Setup |
| pkgmgr | Windows Package Manager |
| pnpunattend | AuditSystem, Unattend online driver install |
| pnputil | Microsoft PnP Utility |
| query | QUERY { PROCESS | SESSION | TERMSERVER | USER } |
| quser | Display information about users logged on to the system. |
| robocopy | Robust File Copy for Windows |
| rpcping | Pings a server using RPC. |
| setx | Creates or modifies environment variables in the user or system environment. Can set variables based on arguments, regkeys or file input. |
| sxstrace | WinSxs Tracing Utility. |
| takeown | This tool allows an administrator to recover access to a file that was denied by re-assigning file ownership. |
| timeout | This utility accepts a timeout parameter to wait for the specified time period (in seconds) or until any key is pressed. It also accepts a parameter to ignore the key press. |
| tracerpt | Microsoft TraceRpt |
| waitfor | This tool sends, or waits for, a signal on a system. When /S is not specified, the signal will be broadcasted to all the systems in a domain. If /S is specified, then the signal will be sent only to the specified system. |
| wbadmin | Backup command-line tool |
| wceutil | Windows Event Collector Utility |
| wevtutil | Windows Events Command Line Utility. |
| where | Displays the location of files that match the search pattern. By default, the search is done along the current directory and in the paths specified by the PATH environment variable. |
| whoami | This utility can be used to get user name and group information along with the respective security identifiers (SID), privileges, logon identifier (logon ID) for the current user (access token) on the local system. i.e. who is the current logged on user? If no switch is specified, tool displays the user name in NTLM format (domainusername). |
| winrm | Windows Remote Management |
| winrs | Windows Remote Shell |
| winsat | Windows System Assessment Tool |
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There’s also WinRM – Windows Remote Management.
Great. Thanks. winrm is actually not an executable. It’s available as winrm.cmd and winrm.vbs . I only checked the exe files, no wonder I missed it.
Cool list, was helpful. Thank you for that. But I doubt Vista’s gonna gain popularity heights equalling XP itself. Atleast not so soon in 3 years. But thats just IMO then…
Window Vista
There are some good shortcuts there.
windows is trying, and we give them props for that. But until we can install windows from cli it’s just a useless bloated pig of an os.