New Command Line Tools in Vista Beta 2

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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6 Comments

  1. 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.

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