4NT
I’ve been around for a while and any of you old DOS users know, that DOS and the batch files you could create were quite limiting. There was this one product that really brought DOS to life and made living in the DOS world a lot easier. That product was 4Dos (which is now free and is still useful in the Windows 95/98/ME world). When I moved to NT 4.0 way back in 96 or so I switched to 4NT. It provided the same features as 4DOS and even more. The NT command shell (CMD) had a lot more features than DOS but it still lacked the extras that 4Dos provided.
I especially like the debugger. It makes it easy to debug batch files. Even batch files that don’t use any 4NT features. Another feature that I have found extremely useful is the logging feature. One use is to capture a set of commands that you want to be in a batch file. You can enter your series of commands while logging is turned on and the log will contain them. The real benefit that I get from it is capturing what a batch file has done and when it did it. It timestamps each log entry so you can see what commands are taking a long time. I used this once to determine that it was much faster to download a complicated batch file and execute it locally rather than execute it from a network drive.
To the casual user 4NT is expensive, but JP Software packages in a suite of 3 products. The other two products are Take Command which is a GUI version of 4NT and their product called TCI (Tabbed Console Interface) which gives you the ability to run multiple consoles in one window. The Suite costs $99.00. If you have to work with batch files and scripts then you can’t be without this.