Shell Scripts on the PC

This began as a project to write a set of essays for use by my co-workers as an aid to understanding the DOS batch programs I wrote for user account and machine management, and for numerous one-off programs to solve problems and provide unusual services. It got out of hand. Win95, with its brain-dead batch language, came along - then NT and its very different batch language - then DOS started going away and Linux appeared on the scene.
It appeared to me that the best way to continue the work was to make the original essays into one volume of a multi-volume work covering all of the environments I use in separate sets of essays. This is the master wrapper page and introduction for that grand scheme. I don't expect it ever to be complete - the operating environments come and go faster than I can master their shell script languages. If the links are not active, I haven't actually written anything on that topic yet.

Table of Contents

Introduction to Shell Scripts
DOS Batch Language: A Personal View
Win9x Batch Language: Scripts for a Brain-Dead Language
NT4 Scripting: A Usable Batch Language at Last
Scripts for Multiple MS environments: Using Additional Languages
Linux Bash Scripts: The World is my Oyster
Canned Responses to Certain Batch FAQs
Character codes in decimal, hex, and octal
Frank Westlake's Freeware NT Utilities (Mirror of discontinued original site)



"Microsoft may love you very much, but with Windows you still have to go eat worms." - Nicholas Petreley in InfoWorld 5/19/00.