Take Command

The Ultimate Command Line Toolkit

Sure, you're pretty good at figuring out Windows, but nothing beats the level of power and flexibility that you can achieve by going to the command line prompt! And while you may consider yourself an expert at the command line, today's discount software promotion is going to supercharge your experience! It's Take Command!

Take Command is an interactive GUI and Windows command line toolkit that makes working with command prompts easier and much more powerful. With Take Command, you'll get tabbed console windows, big improvements to standard Windows file movement commands, a cornucopia of over 140 new commands, plus thousands of additional features. If you're into batch file programming, you'll love the extensions offered by Take Command, which include DO loops, error handling, exception handling, block-structured logic, and an integrated IDE featuring a powerful editor and debugger, plus support for third party plug-ins.

With the ability to customize themes, colors, menus, toolbars, and windows, Take Command is designed to fit well into the way that you like to work. And when you're ready, you can start learning the TCC scripting language, featuring hundreds of internal commands, functions, and variables that let you accomplish the work of dozens of Windows CMD lines in just one or two!

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Platforms: Windows XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, 7 (including x64)

Experience great power and flexibility with the Windows command prompt
Enjoy tabbed console windows, improvements to standard Windows CMD commands, and more
Conduct extensive batch file programming using a powerful editor and debugger
Customize themes, colors, menus, toolbars, and windows
Master a scripting language that's worlds beyond the standard Windows CMD ability
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The Conversation

Email Updates

Harald Vogel I'm already a registerd user of TCC/LE 12. Will there also be a discount on the upgrade to TCC/LE 13 oder for the upgrade to TakeCommand? Thanks.

Feb 20 at 2:04am

Exolon Miner @Harald Vogel

TCC/LE is free, so there is no fee upgrading to TCC/LE 13.

In case you are talking about TCMD/LE. Rex decided to discontinue TCMD/LE and give the LE users a free upgrade to the full version, so there should be no payed upgrade from TCMD/LE to TCMD, too.

@Rex glad to see Take Command at bits. Hope your sells will go well.

Feb 20 at 4:34am

Harald Vogel @Exolon Miner

Sorry for the confusion. I meant TCMD/LE. I'm a registered user of Version 12 of TCMD/LE and as I understand it (I just visited the website and didn't know that until I heard if from you) only Version 13 users got a free upgrade.

Please tell me if I'm wrong but I would be eligible for an upgrade to V13 of Take Command for 49,95 like the offered price here anyway. And so I would like to know if there will be also a discount for upgrading.

Thanks.

Feb 20 at 5:18am

Rex Conn We sent free upgrades to the full Take Command v13 last November, to all Take Command/LE users. (We had already sent free Take Command/LE v13 upgrades to the registered v12 Take Command/LE users.)

If you didn't receive your Take Command v13 upgrade (spam folder?), email us at support@jpsoft.com.

JP Software Vendor - Feb 20 at 6:51am

Michael R. I like the possibility to debug a batch-file.

Does TakeCommand allow to have a kind-of-CMD-subset-mode. So it would be possible to allow the creation and debugging of pure CMD-commands which would also run on computers without TakeCommand?

Feb 21 at 2:27am

a a What support does it have for organising/running batch files/scripts ?

For example, can I drag and drop batch files to the toolbar to create toolbar buttons for each batch file, which will run when I click the button ?

Can I assign keyboard shortcuts to batch files ?

I can see me creating lots of batch files/scripts for various tasks, and I'm wondering how TC will help me to organise/group/run them ?

Feb 21 at 2:50am

Rex Conn Yes, the Take Command scripting language is a superset of CMD, so you can use the batch editor / debugger to create and debug CMD-compatible batch files that will run on any Windows system.

JP Software Vendor - Feb 21 at 4:52am

Rex Conn Yes, you can create buttons on the tabbed toolbar to run individual batch files. (Up to 50 buttons on each of up to 20 toolbar tabs, which can be organized and named however you like.)

TC doesn't currently support simply dropping a batch file on the toolbar to create a button -- you would right-click on the toolbar to open the button creation dialog.

You can create "key aliases" to invoke batch files with a single keystroke (either executing them immediately or wait for additional arguments).

JP Software Vendor - Feb 21 at 4:58am

marek jedlinski Is the pure command-line version still included? Fingers crossed :)

Feb 21 at 1:49pm

Rex Conn Yes. There are three components in Take Command:

1) The command-line interpreter (TCC, formerly called 4NT)

2) The IDE (batch file editor and debugger)

3) The tabbed windowing environment (Take Command)

You can run them independently or have Take Command run TCC and the IDE.

JP Software Vendor - Feb 21 at 2:25pm

marek jedlinski Wonderful, thank you!

Feb 21 at 2:46pm

Richard Blake Just read your license, focusing my attention on install limits. I bike to work; carrying a laptop back and forth is not an option, so I need to install on two PCs to get what laptop users get from one. You provide that, as do many other software titles. Never before have I seen the restriction that the computers must normally be kept at separate locations and "they are never used simultaneously except during active transfer of files between them". (Perhaps that last point should pertain to simultaneous use of the installed TC, rather than simultaneous use of the computers on which the product is installed.) But I keep two PCs at work and two at home: to install on all four I require two licenses. On the Volume Pricing page I see that I would pay "only" $180 rather than $200 (or $100 through the BdJ offer). But that is identical to the cost for a company to provide the software to two individual users (a pair of computers for each). Doesn't look very compelling to this single user. I guess I'll survive on cmd.exe, Windows PowerShell, gawk and similarly priced offerings.

Feb 22 at 7:28pm

Rex Conn There isn't any restriction on the locations of the machines (see http://jpsoft.com/license.html). There is a restriction on using a single license simultaneously on multiple active machines; the intent isn't to treat a single license as a multi-system license for use by multiple users. A single-system Take Command license does allow activating up to three machines -- see the Policy tab on this page. (I would prefer to only pay for a single copy of Windows to install on all my systems, but Microsoft understandably disagrees!)

Take Command is intended for developers, administrators, and power users. If your needs are are simple enough to be satisfied by CMD, then there's probably no compelling reason for you to upgrade to Take Command.

JP Software Vendor - Feb 22 at 7:51pm

Monte Jones We we be able to upgrade V 11 to current for a 50% discount a well?

Feb 23 at 12:24am

Avi S Does TC support the full range of powershell commands (most importantly, the ability to perform COM automation from the command line and within scripts, and the ability to perform regular expression analysis on the command line)?

Feb 23 at 1:57am

Rex Conn This promotion is only for new copies, not for upgrades. However, we do currently have a $10 discount for upgrade copies (reducing the total to $39.95 for an upgrade) to celebrate our new web site; use the coupon code "Newsite".

JP Software Vendor - Feb 23 at 4:43am

Rex Conn The TCC command processor component of Take Command has a large (but not identical) overlap with the PowerShell feature set. (Though most of the PowerShell features require additional .net programming.) Not sure what you're looking for with the COM automation -- to control Take Command or to control other apps? TCC has a COM interface to control it (though it's not widely used as there are generally easier ways to do it). To control other apps you'd probably use a bit of script with one of the supported languages (Perl, Python, REXX, Tcl, Ruby, VBScript, Javascript, or any Active Scripting language).

Regarding regular expressions -- Take Command supports regular expressions for file and directory names (for example, in the internal commands like COPY, DEL, DIR, etc.), text searching (in the FFIND, LIST, and VIEW internal commands, or when searching the scrollback buffers of the tab windows), conditional tests (DO, FOR, IF, IFF, etc.), searching popup windows (filename completion, command and directory history), and in several of the internal variable functions. (If there's a particular RE usage you're looking for that I haven't mentioned, let me know.)

JP Software Vendor - Feb 23 at 4:59am

Rex Conn We haven't had any requests for right-to-left language support before, so we haven't spent any time looking at it. (We have sold a lot of copies in Israel, but presumably they're either using Take Command in English, or the right-to-left support is already working.)

If you have problems with RTL languages, let us know. We don't have any in-house expertise, but we should be able to figure it out with a little help from the users (as we've done with the DBCS languages).

JP Software Vendor - Feb 23 at 5:06am

Avi S Hi Rex,
Thank you for your reply.
1] I'm thrilled to hear about the ability to use COM automation to control TCC. Where is this documented (I didn't see it in the help file)?
2] However, I was really interested in using COM automation to control MS Office apps and Adobe Acrobat, which I do from within powershell scripts, and even from the powershell command line. I notice that on your site (http://jpsoft.com/blogs/2...powershell/) you indicate that you would be able to integrate TCC functionality into powershell as a plugin - that is something that I would be very interested in using! Please let all of us BDJ users know whether you would be able to implement this soon.
3] In terms of workflow within TCC, I'm puzzled by one seemingly simple action that I am having a hard time streamlining. I'd like to use the integrate GUI browser to navigate to a file, and then to take that file from the "list view" and paste its full path on the command line. I can use the mouse to drag the file to the command box to accomplish this. However, in order to do this efficiently, I'd like to use the keyboard - ideally, I'd like to have one keystroke that would take the selected file in the list view and paste it onto the command line. But I can't find any way to do this. Although TCC has the ability to assign keystrokes to various copy+paste actions, there is no option to do so from list view to command prompt. Worse, the keyboard shortcuts for "copy" do not work in list view - pressing ctrl-ins etc. copies text in the command prompt window; however, I cannot use the keyboard shortcut to copy the file from list view and paste it on the command prompt. I'd really like to see a streamlined option for this type of operation (maybe I can do it via COM automation of TCC?)
4] As you have seen, I work with files in multiple languages, and one of the big advantages of powershell for me is its support of UTF-8 and its ability to convert between formats. On the otherhand, as far as I can tell, TCC only works with the basic code pages of DOS; I could not even go into "cmd /u" without losing TCC support. So, that's another reason that I'd really like to see TCC support within powershell.
5] Regex support - Thanks for the summary of regex options in TC. I've tried it out and it is very flexible and impressive.

Feb 23 at 5:21am

Rex Conn Hi Avi:
Detailed support questions like this are best handled in our (very active) support forums (http://jpsoft.com/forums), where other users can contribute and benefit from the discussions.
1) See the SCRIPT command in the help.
2) The proposed TCC plugin for PowerShell has languished due to a general lack of interest, though it could certainly be revived if enough users ask for it. (Submit a feature request through the orange Feedback tab on the left side of the jpsoft.com web pages.)
3) There isn't currently any way to retrieve the current List View selection and paste it to the command line using the keyboard only. (Though it is possible to retrieve the selection in the Folder View -- see %_TCFOLDER.) It wouldn't be hard to do; I'll add it to the suggestion list.
4) TCC and Take Comamnd are native Unicode, and TCC supports input & output in both ASCII and Unicode (unlike CMD, which only has a Unicode output option and cannot handle things like Unicode batch files). TCC has a /U startup option (to send redirected output as Unicode). (This option can also be toggled on & off from the command line.) There is also some support for UTF-8 input files, specifically in the FFIND and LIST commands.

JP Software Vendor - Feb 23 at 6:25am

Avi S Hi Rex,
Thanks for the information. There's no question that TCC is an indispensable utilty (why hadn't I heard of it before?!), and your willingness to respond to user requests and to provide details here on the forum clinches it. I've just purchased the product here on BDJ.
- Avi

Feb 23 at 6:36am

Rex Conn Hi Avi:
It's been hard to find ways to get the word out about Take Command / TCC -- when you're the only player in the market, people don't even know that the market exists, so it never occurs to anyone to search for the product!
But if all of our users tell 10 of their friends, and they each tell 10 of their friends ... :-)

JP Software Vendor - Feb 23 at 6:50am

Avi S Hi Rex,
I have registered on your site and I have attempted to post further questions on the forum there, however when I log in your site indicates that I do not have sufficient privileges to post. Not sure why that is happening?
In any case, then, I'll continue to follow up here - I was thrilled to hear that TCC can format output as Unicode or UTF-8. Within the TCC options, I found a checkbox for unicode output, and checking it did indeed result in correctly formatted Unicode-16 output. Ideally, though, I'd like to take advantage of the UTF-8 option; however, I don't see any options for that on the options screen. Is there a way to specify the /U8 option as a default parameter for TCC to use when launching its command windows?
Thanks,
Avi

Feb 23 at 6:52am

Rex Conn Hi Avi:
The support forum is moderated -- we average over 800 attempted spammer registrations every day, so new user registrations have to be approved by a moderator before they can post. Your registration has been approved, so you can now post in any of the forums. (There is no further moderation once you've been approved.)

JP Software Vendor - Feb 23 at 7:22am

peter hayes G'Day,

Could this be installed (and registered/activated/licenced) on a thumb drive to enable portable use on multiple machines (as an administrator for multiple backend servers) at several remotely located sites?

Feb 23 at 11:34am

Rex Conn Yes, you can install and activate Take Command on a thumb drive and move it among different machines. (This feature is new to Take Command v13.)

JP Software Vendor - Feb 23 at 11:49am

peter hayes G'Day,

Great, off to buy now, looking forward to using this, should make life that little bit easier :-)

Feb 23 at 12:33pm

Emil Kucera Hello to Rex from a happy user (since the 4DOS versions of this great program). Anybody working with command line without it should RUSH in and take advantage of the deal!
Hope everybody tells 10+ friends about it :-)
Regards Emil

Feb 23 at 12:41pm

Rex Conn And I didn't even have to pay Emil to say that ... :-)

JP Software Vendor - Feb 23 at 3:33pm

Steven Avery Hi,

I bought a lighter-weight program PowerCmd, from Bits years ago, and it has been great. This one is a bit more techie, with many more features, I am not sure I have a use, but I will say that command.com really needs a shell for cut and paste, proper history and review, etc, when used for ... almost anything but the most trivial requests.

Steven

Feb 23 at 5:54pm

Avi S Hi Steven,
I also bought PowerCmd from BDJ some time ago, and I've bought TC now. TC is a far, far more advanced program than PowerCmd, and its advantages over PowerCmd numbers in the hundreds, if not the thousands.
I'll just note a few specific ones that I find extremely important:
- TC is blazingly fast, much faster than command.com! In contrast, PowerCmd is significantly slower than command.com, especially when it comes to traversing directories with thousands of files, or when performing "dir" operations on such directories.
- TC adds a very sophisticated set of additional commands for scripting and processing. Here I'll suffice by noting the ability to work with regular expressions directly on the command line.
For instance, if I want to find all files that are over 20 characters in length, I can do this directly like this:
dir "::.{20}"
- Finally, TC has an extremely active forum, and it is under constant development. I've already found that queries on the forum are answered within minutes, and the developers are adding new features in response to user input on a regular basis. In contrast, with PowerCmd I ran into a various serious bug regarding the way it handles shell commands run from a command-line utility. I corresponded with the guys at PowerCmd and sent them a full set of programs (with source code) to reproduce the problem. Although they expressed interest in looking into it, months have gone by, and I haven't seen any change. The developers are presumably involved in other projects.

Feb 23 at 6:22pm

Rex Conn PowerCmd covers maybe 1% of the Take Command feature set. We have a comparison table on our web site at:

http://jpsoft.com/compari...ndows.html

that compares Take Command, Console2, PromptPal, and PowerCmd.

JP Software Vendor - Feb 23 at 7:06pm

Gonzo Well, I was planning to stop buying software until next month (mainly due to my current economy) but BDJ strikes again... Not sure if I should be happy or simply cry...
I never heard of this app before, though I bought and used PowerCmd; however after checking the features set as well as the comments here, despite the price being high for me I decided to buy this.

Thanks JP Software and BDJ!

Feb 23 at 9:05pm

Steven Avery Hi Folks,

And I have no doubt that for the person doing lots of command line programming or actions, Take Command is the way to go. Tabs, more flexibility, speed, lots of programming power, etc.

Just for people like myself, whose programming is more database and minicomputer and this and that, Windows command line usage is only occasional and light. (I am more concerned with OCL and CL on the iSeries). An FTP here, a ping there, some other specials now and then, usually done with Powercmd. So the expense is hard to justify.

The blurb says:

"If you're into batch file programming..."

And, so far, I am not. If that changes, I know where to look !

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Feb 23 at 9:07pm

Avi S @Steven,
You're certainly entitled to do what you want, but I have to stress that the benefits of Take Command are extremely significant for the non-programming power user as well.

Let's just take the example of a directory with several thousand files. In PowerCmd, just doing a "cd" into that directory can freeze the application for half a minute, and attempting a filename completion can freeze the system for even more time. [When I contacted PowerCmd about this, they suggested that I reorganize my directory structure to avoid having so many files in one directory]
TC, on the other hand, provides instant "cd" access to such directories, *and* instant autocompletion - I just tried this now - in a directory with many thousands of files, typing one letter and hitting tab *instantly* brought up the first item, and hitting tab again brought the next entry, etc.
For me, the ability to quickly and efficiently navigate my file system is a clincher in and of itself. PowerCmd just can't keep up.
Similarly with regard to regular expressions - regular expressions do not require programming skills; they are tools that can be used by all power users, and they provide indispensable precision in specification of data and filtering of files. I gave one example above - searching for filenames of a certain length. Another real-world example would be searching for all filenames that have a five-digit code somewhere in the filename. Again, for the non-programmer who wants to yield this power at the command line, TC is well worth the money.

Feb 23 at 9:21pm

Steven Avery Hi Folks,

Ironically, I recently had a recursive (created from my error) directory with many thousands of entries that i had to delete, filling up a disk. And it could not be done by normal methods.

In that case I had to pass by some pay tools and ended up with Deep Remove from Codeplex, open source, which worked perfectly. Maybe Take Command would have worked, but I hope to never have to find out again :) .

As for searching, I probably would be using Everything, Locate or one of the File managers .... the number of times I have to drop down to command line power .. it does not really happen. Some of those tools are pretty sophisticated for normal use.

When I find myself doing the command line programming, I will know where to go. I always like the best tool for the job.

And I recommend just about everybody have some shell tool.

I could easily turn around in a few months and be searching for the next discount with bated breath. However, lets be reasonable, a lot of folks simply do not do much at the command line, even semi-tech users. And $50 is a spot of scratch for possibilities or what may happen next moth.

Steven

Feb 23 at 9:49pm

Michael R. Bought it... Thanks for the answer above. But what I meant was, it would be great to be able to (temporarily - of course) switch TakeCommand in a kind of CMD-subset-mode, so it would not understand the additional TakeCommand-commands and options. So when the batch-file runs fine after debugging, this would result in a batch-file, which could be run also on systems without TakeCommand.

Is there a command (or another quick way) to let the list-view-window display exactly the directory I am currently in inside the console-window? This would be very usefull...

Feb 23 at 10:05pm

Rex Conn Yes, you can configure the List View / Folder View windows to follow your current TCC tab window session. This is commonly requested by new TC users, but they almost invariably stop doing it after a short time because it has some disadvantages (like rendering the drag & drop between the view windows and the tab windows pointless.

But if you really want to do it, look in the help under "Take Command and TCC Integration". You just need to create an alias for CD (or a PRE_INPUT alias) that includes the "CDD /T ..." option. There have been several discussions on our support forums (http://jpsoft.com/forums) on the different ways to do it.

JP Software Vendor - Feb 23 at 10:28pm

Michael R. Thanks again for the fast answer.

Instead of always following the current directory in the command-tab, I thought about entering a command in case that I need to do something with this directory in a visual way, e.g. 'vis'.

In my case, I was in the command-window inside a directory and had an open explorer window. Now I wanted to drag and drop a file from this to the directory in the command-window. Here, when entering the short command (e.g. 'vis') would be useful: The list-window would change to the desired directory and I could drag & drop the files into it...

Just an idea...

Feb 23 at 11:58pm

Rex Conn "Is there a way to find out from inside a batch-file if the current interpreter is CMD or TakeCommand?"

You can test for one of the TCC internal variables or functions. For example:

if "%_4ver" != "" goto take_command

if %@eval[2+2] == 4 goto take_command

The first one (_4VER) is unlikely to be in your environment when running CMD, but it is barely possible.

The second example will never be true in CMD.

JP Software Vendor - Feb 24 at 5:33am

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