[Tutor] Looking for ConfigObj Documentation

[Alan Gauld]

"Wayne Watson" <sierra_mtnview at sbcglobal.net> wrote

> My assumption was is was fully a DOS window.  

No its a DOS window on steroids!
Thee are a ton of improvements to the DOS shell in XP 
most of which are turned off by default.

Take half an hour to go through the help screens for CMD 
and turn on the various registry settings it mentions to 
access its full power. (Type HELP CMD at the prompt)

> Trying to work my way to folder was a bit daunting, 

Cut n paste of the path works, but you can also use tab 
to complete the file name which speeds things up considerably.
(And recall that with QuickEdit turned on you can easily cut n paste 
from the CMD window itself)

> Now the problem became one of typing in the name of the 
> program each time it was to be executed. 

Even on DOS F3 repeated the last command but 
on XP (and indeed since Win95) you can use up/down arrow 
to step back through the command history. And you can 
set it to remember the history betweeen sessions (although 
I don't personally do that...) I think you can also search 
back through the history but I don't use that very often 
and I'm maybe confusing it with cygwin/bash!
This works inside the python prompt in a CMD window too.

Other tricks include environment variable expansion good 
for HOME, PATH, etc

Definitely worth spending some time reading the HELP on 
the enhanced CMD features.

-- 
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/