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As long as we are on the topic of cool things to do at a command line. Here is a little trick I played on the sytem administrator of the campus I used to attend. He was a die-hard microsoft guy, in fact the whole campus was. They wouldn't allow me to put a linux box anywhere on the campus. They called it a security threat. I had to laugh in their faces at that remark...

Anyways, this trick involves some knowledge of windows but here goes.

First set the priority of batch (.bat) files above that of executable (.exe) files. So when windows checks a directory for a program to run, it will execute the batch script before the executable. This is actually the hardest part to do.

Secondly, the fun part. We created a file called CMD.bat in his system32 directory. Basically all the batch file did was spawn a real CMD window and then change the prompt.

We changed the prompt to C:\My P0rn>

No matter what you do, the prompt stays at C:\My P0rn> Usually when you exit out of cmd and spawn a new one, defaults are restored. But since the batch file supercedes the executable, he was screwed. For a big sysadmin, he sure got schooled by a couple of "linux users", as he called us.

The command to change the prompt is actually "prompt" followed by arguments. In our case, the command was "prompt C:\My P0rn$G" Experiment, and have fun...

-Weaver