Command Prompt Here seems to be a well-known feature among the Windows users. It lets you right-click on a folder and open a command prompt with the current working directory set to that folder.

But what about its “functional inverse”, i.e., start an explorer to explore the current directory? Well, you can execute explorer . in the Command Prompt, but that will not be exactly “correct” since the tree view of folders is missing. Apparently you have to add a completely obscure argument… I put this command in a batch file on my path:

start "" explorer /e, .

Note that there cannot be a space between the “e” and the comma. Don’t ask.

PsTools from Sysinternals is a collection of command line utilities that let you manipulate processes in Windows. Among the tools, I personally use pslist and pskill every single day(*). Check it out!

And if you have pslist, then put the following into a batch file, say mlist.bat. It’s very handy for nailing down memory leaks. (Note that the @ sign in the front of a command in a batch file suppresses the echoing of the command. That’s why many batch files start with @echo off.)

@pslist | sort -n +5 | tail -n 10

BTW, with the release of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, Microsoft has bundled two command line tools that do similar things (tasklist and taskkill). However, their command line interface is awkward. I recommend you forget about them and stick with PsTools.

(*) largely because of Firefox and Acrobat