Microsoft has developed a more robust command line interface (CLI) for Windows XP and Windows Vista called Windows PowerShell that is supposed to bring to Windows a Unix style command line. It can be downloaded and installed for free from this link:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/default.mspx
snichols I tried it and it's much better then DOS, but comes with many brand new commands, so there's a learning curve involved. There are some commands that will look familiar ported from Unix, like diff and ls. You can do math operations right within the shell and call other programs like BASH or DOS does. Has anyone else tried and what did you think?
LV So, what's the connection to Tcl?
snichols They're both interpreted languages. Yet another choice for a programmer when they need to script something, but PowerShell's use would only be for Windows oriented tasks. Bash runs on multiple platforms like Linux, Unix, Mac, etc, and PowerShell is unique to Windows, but still much more robust then the predecessor DOS.
LV Microsoft purchased Interix who makes a POSIX Windows kernel that provides quite a useful command line environment that includes ksh, perl, tcl and other pieces. It was called Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX (SFU). See details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows_Services_for_UNIX . Note that while it is available for free download for Windows XP, a number of its components come in Windows Server 2003 R2 and Vista. I don't know how one completes those environments.
MHo: It should be noted that this CLI requires the .NET-Environment. IMHO this is a little overweight for a command line interface. And why is MS constantly busy in reinventing the wheel? There are already enough CLIs on this world, like BASH (oder TCLSH ;-), which are already documented, available nearly everywhere and well known. We all remember, a few years ago, MS claimed VBScript to be the definitve scripting environment. And so it goes on and on and on and on...