I've noticed two positive health indicators for the future of command-shell scripting. The first is the number of new third-party tools that I'm seeing on the market, and the second is that many of these tools contain built-in parsing capabilities for input files. Those of us who have mastered the use of the For command to parse input files and call commands might not think these built-in capabilities are crucial, but at least utility developers are finally understanding that we don't always use their tools against one node but often against hundreds or even thousands of nodes.
What other less-obvious advantages might you realize by having input-file parsing built into a tool? I can think of a big one. If you're using Task Scheduler to schedule tasks, you now have another option: Instead of launching a script that calls a tool, you can go to your task's Properties sheet and place commands directly on the Run line. It's possible that even after you stop a scripted task in Task Scheduler, a process that launched with the script might continue working until you discover it and kill it. When you stop a task that's directly specified on the Run line—such as the BeyondExec (beyond-execv2.exe) tool that I talk about in this article—it gets killed. (The only possibility of a run-on process would be one launched on a remote machine that continues until completion.) . . .
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