Automate Your Life with 4 Simple Terminal & CMD Commands
Automate tasks without creating a script from scratch, but using commands that work on both the cmd (Windows) and terminal (macOS)
Published in
7 min readMay 7, 2022
When a coworker told me I could automate some boring tasks without having to create a script from scratch, I was as surprised as the girl in the image above.
Back then, I used to open up my text editor and start writing Python code to automate most of my everyday tasks at work. Little did I know that some terminal commands could easily take care of some repetitive tasks I had.
The terminal (also known as command prompt or cmd on Windows) can help us automate simple tasks on our computer without the use of a graphical user interface (GUI) and, in this article, I’ll show you how to automate file and data manipulation with only terminal commands.
Table of Contents
1. First Things First — Get to Know the terminal & Commands to Use
- The “ren” command
- The "type" / “cat” command
2. Automate Stuff With Only Terminal Commands
- Rename Multiple File Names with "ren"
- Concatenate Multiple Files with "type" / “cat”
- Append a File to Another File with "type" / “cat”
- Add Current Date to a File Name with “ren”
