How to set up a .rc file for the cmd shell on windows

In the Unix world, all command shells allow you to set up your command line environment by adding commands to 'rc' files, .bashrc, .profile, .tcshrc, .cshrc, etc... The cmd.exe shell on Windows does not have a '.cmdrc' file, so you are left with a default setup every time you start a new shell. Luckily, there is a way to source a batch file when cmd.exe starts.


Here's a section of the help text from running “cmd /?”:

If /D was NOT specified on the command line, then when CMD.EXE starts, it looks for the following REG_SZ/REG_EXPAND_SZ registry variables, and if either or both are present, they are executed first.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\AutoRun

and/or

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\AutoRun

So, you can set up your system to run any script every time you run cmd.exe. Just run regedit, navigate to the path above, create the string value, and set it to the path of a batch file, excluding the '.bat' extension.

For example, “c:/rc”, where the actual file is c:/rc.bat. Batch files are run the way scripts are sourced in Unix shells, so all variables and changes to the environment will affect the new shell.