With just a few minor adjustments the Windows Command Prompt (cmd.exe) can emulate the behaviour of your favourite *nix shell. Please note, this isn't a full emulation method - the existing Windows commands are being manipulated to appear as their *nix shell counterparts.

Note: This is for systems where unauthorized software is not permitted. If you administrate your own system, I highly recommend checking the GnuWin32, in particular the CoreUtils package.

Background

This method involves simple implementation of the doskey macro utility. For convenience, a Windows batch file (*.bat) will be used to wrap calls to doskey. Some small adjustments to the registry are necessary, so it is strongly advised that the registry is backed up before reading further.

Create a Command List Batch File

1. Open a text editor of your choice (e.g. notepad).
2. The following are some examples of how to add a *nix command, with the Windows Command Prompt equivalent:
   @ECHO OFF
doskey sudo=runas /user:administrator $*
doskey alias=doskey $*
doskey ls=dir $*
doskey rm=del $*
doskey cp=copy $*
doskey mv=move $*
doskey clear=cls
doskey reboot=echo The system is going down for reboot NOW!$T shutdown -r
doskey restart=reboot
doskey top=tasklist
doskey traceroute=tracert $*
doskey kill=taskkill /F /IM $*
echo [%USERNAME%@%COMPUTERNAME%]$ *nix commands added

3. Save as a batch file somewhere on your system, e.g. C:\nix-cmd.bat

Please note: Not all commands will behave exactly like their counterpart, however these are some examples from my batch file.

Enabling Batch File and Tab-key Auto-complete

1. Start->Run->regedit
2. To add auto-complete for...
   ... just your username:
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor
   ... all system users:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor
3. Modify the key entries to reflect your system settings, although they should appear somewhat similar to the below:
   
   

   *nix cmd registry screen capture

If you want to use a different key for auto-complete (i.e. not tab), then change the CompletionChar and PathCompletionChar values to the desired hexadecimal character code.

Footnote

That is all there is to it! I mostly make do with the commands above - its just a nice little tweak to make the command prompt a bit more usable.

	$exts = get_loaded_extensions();

	foreach($exts as $ext) {
		$flist[$ext] = get_extension_funcs($ext);
	}

	print_r($flist);

This is a nice starting point if you wanted to write a script that determines whether the server you're installing onto has the necessary PHP extensions loaded.

I thought I'd make a little script that takes advantage of this easteregg and the inherent format of GIF image files to determine whether PHP is running on a remote server.

<?php

	// Configuration.
	$url = 'http://www.example.com/'; // Replace with whichever URL.

	// Open the connection.
	$handle = @fopen($url.'?=PHPE9568F36-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42', 'r');
	if($handle)
		echo("Handle active...\n"); else
		die("Error creating handle!\n");

	// Import data into buffer.
	$buffer = fgets($handle, 4);
	if($buffer == 'GIF') // <- part of the binary header for GIF files.
		echo("This server is using PHP!\n"); else
		echo("This server is NOT using PHP!\n");

	// Close up, clean up.
	$ret = fclose($handle);
	$handle = NULL;
	if($ret)
		echo('Success!'); else
		die('Failed to close handle!');

?>

Don't forget to replace $url with the server address before using this script.

This is quite irritating, as previously the default behavior would be to return a unique object identifier. However, there is a quick workaround for this problem should your script rely upon object string casting / this unique object identifier.

The Fix

When creating your class, add in __toString() as a function. This so-called 'magic function' is called when trying to cast an object to string, such as (string) $someObject. The following combines this function with a call to spl_object_hash(), which provides an identifier hash for the object:

<?php

class SomeClass {
	function __toString() {
		return spl_object_hash($this);
	}
}

$someObject = new SomeClass;
echo $someObject;

?>

The above code is fairly self-explanatory and it saves you from at least a few of minutes banging your head on the table :-)

As of PHP v5.2.2 objects do not have a default response to being cast to (string). To make this tutorial work with newer PHP builds, use spl_object_hash() in place of string casting.

Introduction

When a new object is created in PHP it is assigned an internal numeric id value. The only way to destroy an object (thereby deleting its internal id) is to unset() or nullify (=NULL) all references to the object from within the script. It follows that when an object is destroyed, PHP will fill the lowest id available for the next object. For example: if objects with ids 4, 5 and 6 exist - by destroying 5, the next two objects created in PHP will have id 5 and then id 7!

These rules can be exploited to provide a much faster object in_array()!

Theory

Comparison of multidimensional objects will almost always be more processor intensive than string comparison. It occurred to me that a great deal of time could be saved by identifying objects in an array as strings. However, conventional approaches using serialize() tend to exacerbate the problem further as the function itself is quite slow. The following is the proposed function with a demo on how it could be implemented.

/***
	The proposed object_in_array function.
	***/
	function object_in_array($needle, $haystack) {
		/***
		Arguments:
			(object) $needle - The object being searched for.
			(array) $haystack - The array containing objects.
		***/
		$stringArray = array_map(create_function('$in','return (string)$in;'),$haystack);
		$objectString = (string)$needle;
		return in_array($objectString,$stringArray,TRUE);

	}

	/***
	Prepare an object needle.
	***/
	$needleObject = new stdClass;

	/***
	Prepare a sample array including the
	needleObject.
	***/
	$objectArray = array(
		new stdClass,
		new stdClass,
		new stdClass,
		$needleObject
	); 

	/***
	Uncomment the block  below to perform
	an analysis of a much larger array.
	***/

	/*
	for($i=0;$i < 50000;$i++) {
		$objectArray[] = new stdClass;
	}
	$objectArray[] = $needleObject;
	*/

	/***
	Start time-stamp
	***/
	$timeStamp = get_micro_time();

	/***
	NOTE: The print() function is included
	in the time analysis as it doesn't contribute
	much to the overal time required.
	***/
	print(object_in_array($needleObject,$objectArray) ? "Found!\n" : "Not found!\n");

	/***
	End time-stamp and display.
	***/
	$timeStamp = round(get_micro_time() - $timeStamp,6);
	print("Search duration: $timeStamp ms");

	/***
	Auxillary timing function. Sorry,
	I can't remember where I got this function
	from or I would credit the author! Google it :-p
	***/
	function get_micro_time() {
		list($microSec, $sec) = explode(" ", microtime());
		return ((float)$microSec + (float)$sec);
	}

The above can be further optimised (clean-up the temporary array, etc.) but serves to show how the array can be copied, recast and used as a search reference for objects. Modification of the above to use the conventional in_array() or foreach() looping drastically increases the duration of the search! With very little modification to the code, the function could even return the object directly and retain the same array processing speed.

A footnote...

I had previously toyed with the idea of using a single array, casting the objects to strings and storing these as the key for each item (then using array_key_exists() ). If you're not too worried about using the array keys / don't use them to store useful data, this latter method can be ten-fold faster than the above example!

Download files

shcore.js - upload to /scripts
syntaxhighlighter.css - upload to /styles

* Having troubling getting shCore.js to compress using DEP. It's probably just a simple syntax niggle, so I will investigate this when I'm less busy!

This is a 30 second hack - open the default style.css file and search: html>body .entry ul and html>body .entry li removing the html>body part from each.

Open the 'SyntaxHighlighter.css' file for the plugin and change the the .dp-highlighter ol li.alt entry to look like this:

.dp-highlighter ol li.alt
{
	background-color: #fff;
	border-top: 0px;
	border-bottom: 0px;
}