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Comment by msluyter | Hacker News Reader

Shell window from any directory: Adds a Windows Explorer shell window (screenshot) so that you can right-click on any directory and open a command (cmd.exe) window from that directory.

Hmm... but.... why would I wan't to do that? If it opened a window running bash that'd be interesting, but I never ever want to run cmd.exe if I can possibly avoid it. Perhaps that's just me though... can anyone comment on how this compares to cygwin, generally? I see that it's smaller but I don't find cygwin's footprint especially troubling.

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If you don't need to run cmd.exe, then this is likely not for you.

On Windows, I deploy native 64-bit Python, and the application has quite a few command line pyramid scripts, which works perfectly fine with grep, cut, sed, sort, etc from gnuwin32. Don't see the need for cygwin.

Windows provides this feature natively, since Vista or 7 (I don't remember which): when you shift right-click in an explorer window, the option 'Open command window here' appears.

I'm not seeing that on this fairly fresh Windows 7 "Pro" install.

I have added the feature to numerous Vista and XP machines, it is easy enough to add manually though there are many utils that will do it for you, but I can't say I've never seen it present by default.

I had 2 people check for me, one with 7 Home Premium, one with 7 Ultimate, in addition to my own 7 Ultimate; all had the feature I described; none had added it manually.

Strange, I'm definitely not seeing it here.

why would I want to do that

I would want to do that to run a batch file, see the output.

I have, for example, an integration server, Server 2003. It keeps batch files for XML to JDE eleventy directories deep. It is sometimes helpful to exec these manually to see what the trouble is.

> If it opened a window running bash that'd be interesting

Cygwin has a package for that called chere. The whole point of this other thing is that it tuns in cmd.exe, so complaining that it opens cmd.exe is really complaining about the main thing, not just this one feature...

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