Comparing CMD, TCC/LE, and Take Command Shells

The default Windows command shell CMD has always been extremely limited in ability compared to the shells available in other operating systems such as Linux (which has bash, tcsh, zsh, etc.). And Windows CMD commands haven't changed significantly since their first appearance in Windows NT 3.1 (which was released in 1993). Because of these limitations, users have been forced to use the GUI for inappropriate tasks, or to write programs to perform simple tasks that CMD should have been able to handle (either from the command prompt or in batch files).

Take Command is our flagship product. For over 20 years, JP Software has been helping advanced users, developers, system administrators, and technical support professionals save time and money, and ease their command prompt frustrations. Take Command offers a new approach to working in Windows, bringing users the power of the command line and the ease of use of the GUI. Take Command lets you display your Windows console (and simple GUI) applications in tabbed windows, with a Windows Explorer-like interface available for those times when you need a visual look at your folders and files.

Take Command is a complete CMD replacement. that provides you with a vastly better command line UI and thousands of features that are not available in CMD (or even in those Linux shells). And because Take Command is a superset of the CMD commands and syntax, you can install it and immediately be more productive. Take Command includes hundreds of major enhancements to CMD commands such as COPY, DEL, DIR, and START, more than 140 new internal commands, improved command line editing (including a variety of cut and paste options), advanced tab filename completion, and thousands of other new features. If you don't write batch files or need the full feature set, we also offer TCC/LE (a free but unsupported console-mode only limited version of our TCC command processor).

This table gives a brief overview of the features in the Windows 7 CMD, TCC/LE, and Take Command. There are far more features and commands in Take Command and TCC/LE than we can show here. See our Online Help for complete details.

Compare Take Command with other tabbed windows applications.

For specific commands, functions, and variables included in TCC and TCC/LE click here
Features	CMD	TCC/LE	Take Command
Price	Included in Windows	Free	$99.95
Audience	Beginners	Students, Home Users	Developers, Operations, Tech Support, & Power Users
Tabbed Windows Environment
Supports TCC, CMD, PowerShell, and bash Run multiple simultaneous sessions in tabbed windows Command input window (common across tab windows) Integrated Windows file explorer Up to 25 user-defined startup tabs Up to 20 toolbar tabs with 50 programmable buttons each Full text search in any tab window 64-bit Version
Command Prompt
Integrated graphical IDE w/ batch file debugger Optional dialogs for commands (COPY, DEL, DIR, etc.) Extended wildcards Wildcards in both pathnames and/or filenames Enhanced command line editor Screen scrollback buffer Filename completion Directory navigation Built in file editor Direct FTP / HTTP file access (including SSL and SSH) Network file system access (OpenAFS) Active Scripting Integration (Ruby, Perl, Python, VBscript) 64-bit Version
Scripting Language
Internal Commands	34	111	182
Basic Commands Enhanced CMD commands (DIR, COPY, etc) Flow Control (If-Then-Else, Do Loops, Switch, etc) Enhanced batch file commands (error traps, etc) Advanced Commands Send keystrokes to any window Monitor software & hardware events Call Windows APIs and DLL functions Integrated email (SENDMAIL, SENDHTML) Remote computing (RSHELL, REXEC) Network messaging (SMPP, SNMP, SNPP) Windows Management Interface (WMI)
Variables	6	103	177
Functions	0	140	291
Array variables XML file parsing (XMLPATH compatible) File / directory / sharename / server enumeration WMI Functions (embed WMI in other commands) File access (create, read, write) Registry keys (create, read, write, delete) Regular expressions