I still remember on one incident that there was a middle age arrogant student that thinks he knows all and he was in the same Windows 2000 class with me. He has already worked in an IT company for many years. That time the MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer) was teaching us about ipconfig and he asked us to try to type the command. At first he had a blank look on his face because he didn’t even know where to type that command. When the lecturer told us that we can do it from run, he immediately claimed that he knew how to do it. He was looking at the keyboard and slowly typing the ipconfig command with his two index fingers. When he hit enter, he only saw a black window popping up and disappearing. Again, the blank look on his face…

To see the results of the command, he should open up a command prompt first by typing CMD at run and then followed by the ipconfig command. I don’t want to laugh at him or what but shouldn’t he be experienced enough to know that? There are many other command line tools such as nbtstat, ipconfig, ping, net, netstat, rasdial, tracert and etc that must be run in command prompt to see the results.

This may be troublesome for power users or programmers who frequently need to access console programs. To solve this problem, we can embed a command prompt into explorer itself.

Comamnd Prompt Explorer Bar is a small tool that extends Windows Explorer. Next time you need to run a program without GUI, just start the command prompt within explorer. Its current directory will be exactly the same as the current path you are browsing. And better yet the console will appear inside your explorer window – like any other explorer bar does – ‘History’, ‘Favorites’, ‘Folders’ etc. Now you can have the best of both worlds combined together – easy and fast navigation of explorer and power of batch processing of the command prompt.

Command Prompt Explorer Bar

At the left of the console window, there is a toolbar with some nice timesaving features. The most powerful is a button with a ‘Script’ icon on it. It has a drop down menu where you can select a command you like to be executed. It even knows how to substitute ‘{0}’ for the name of the current files selected in explorer. Here is when it can be useful. Let’s say you want to install your assembly into a ‘Native Images Cache’. With Command Bar it is as simply as selecting your assembly in explorer and clicking on ‘ngen {1}’ menu item. It also works just fine for multiple selected files (use {0} instead). Now you can compile your .cs or .vbs files without leaving a comfortable explorer shell. And yes, you can change this menu and scripts the way you like them. It is as simple as editing a text file in a Notepad.

There are two ways to start or hide the command prompt in Windows explorer. You can either go to View > Explorer Bar > and select Command Prompt, or just use the shortcut key CTRL+M.
Start Command Prompt Bar

I think Command Prompt Explorer Bar is one of the best power tool I found this year. It doesn’t even require to run an extra process to take up any memory usage for this feature and the best part is its FREE.

[ Download Command Prompt Explorer Bar | Webpage ]

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