Caelum's Blog

I wanted to set up a cmd.exe environment similar to my msys .bashrc for msysGit (http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/), to set up environment variables and doskey macros (aliases.)

This post will show you some techniques for doing this.

As Larry Wall said, "it's easier to port a shell than a shell script."

I use Console2 for my various command prompts (msysgit, powershell, cmd.exe...) you can get it here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/console/.

First, how do we tell cmd.exe to run a script on startup? There are two ways, the way I use is with the /K option to run a batch file and continue. Another option is to set a registry key, see cmd /? for what registry key to set.

Make a file called .cmd_profile.cmd in your %HOME%, then configure your cmd.exe tabs in Console2 to something like this:

c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /K c:\Users\rkitover\.cmd_profile.cmd

Or make a shortcut on your desktop with this command line.

Or set that registry to the location of your profile script.

My .cmd_profile.cmd looks like this:

@echo off

REM Presumably we will only use real consoles with this profile.
REM And perl readline only works with TERM=dumb .
REM Set this to 'cygwin' to work with cygwin utilities.
set TERM=dumb

doskey use_strawberry64=^
    set PATH=c:\strawberry\perl\site\bin;c:\strawberry\perl\bin;c:\strawberry\c\bin;%PATH%^
    $Tcall remove_path_dups^
    $Tcall strawberry_maint_macros

doskey use_activeperl64=^
    set PATH=C:\Perl64\site\bin;C:\Perl64\bin;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin\amd64;%PATH%^
    $Tcall remove_path_dups^
    $Tset LIB=C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Lib\x64;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\lib\amd64^
    $Tcall activestate_maint_macros

doskey use_activeperl32=^
    set PATH=C:\Perl\site\bin;C:\Perl\bin;c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE;c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin;c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\Tools;c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319;c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5;c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\VCPackages;c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin\NETFX 4.0 Tools;c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin;%PATH%^
    $Tcall remove_path_dups^
    $Tset LIB=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\lib;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\lib^
    $Tset LIBPATH=c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319;C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\LIB^
    $Tcall activestate_maint_macros

call exec_macro use_activeperl32

Some features to notice here:

line continuation

The line continuation and escape character for certain shell metacharacters in batch files is ^.

doskey command separator

The command separator in doskey macros is $T, see doskey /? for more information.

environment variable expansion

Environment variables are expanded immediately when the batch file is executed, not when the command using them runs. Here the %PATH% I use is the %PATH% my cmd.exe starts with, always. This is not what happens in my .bashrc, but it suits my purposes in this case well enough that I haven't fixed it yet.

There are a couple of supporting .cmd utilities to go along with this profile. I put them into C:\Users\rkitover\bin and put that directory in my %PATH%.

exec_macro.cmd

@echo off

for /f "usebackq tokens=*" %%x in (`doskey /macros ^| perl -ne "next unless s/^%*=//; s/\s*\$T/\n/g; print"`) do %%x

remove_path_dups.cmd

@echo off

for /f "usebackq tokens=*" %%x in (`perl -le "for (split /;/, $ENV{PATH}) { $p{$_} || do { $p{$_}++; push @p, $_ }; } print join q{;}, @p"`) do set PATH=%%x

strawberry_maint_macros.cmd

@echo off

doskey pclean=perl Makefile.PL$Tdmake realclean$Tdel /F MANIFEST

doskey pinst=perl Makefile.PL$Tdmake$Tdmake install$Tcall exec_macro pclean

doskey pprepare=rmdir /S inc $Tdel /F MANIFEST$Tperl Makefile.PL$Tdmake manifest$Tperl Makefile.PL$Tdmake

doskey pdist=call exec_macro pprepare$Tdmake dist

doskey pupload=call exec_macro pprepare$Tdmake upload

activeperl_maint_macros.cmd

@echo off

doskey pclean=perl Makefile.PL$Tnmake realclean$Tdel /F MANIFEST

doskey pinst=perl Makefile.PL$Tnmake$Tnmake install$Tcall exec_macro pclean

doskey pprepare=rmdir /S inc $Tdel /F MANIFEST$Tperl Makefile.PL$Tnmake manifest$Tperl Makefile.PL$Tnmake

doskey pdist=call exec_macro pprepare$Tnmake dist

doskey pupload=call exec_macro pprepare$Tnmake upload

These use perl, I'll fix them to use something native like powershell or wsh at some point, but I don't know those languages yet.