Hey, Scripting Guy! Our Favorite Shell Games

There's a good chance that, sooner or later, someone will ask you to write a system administration script that uses the Shell object. What exactly can you do with the Shell object? As it turns out, there are a lot of cool things you can do with the Shell object, some of which (such as managing disk quotas and displaying a progress bar when you copy or move files) have been covered in the Microsoft Windows 2000 Scripting Guide. In this month's column, we're going to show you a few other nifty little things you can do with the Shell object, things you probably had no idea could be done at all, let alone by using the Shell object.

Furthermore, just how good are you at codebreaking? This month's puzzle is a Cryptic Script--a cryptogram where each letter has been replaced by a different letter. Don’t forget to check out this month’s Dr. Scripto's Scripting Perplexer!