Opening explorer shells

I'm often in the command line on a windows box and need to open an explorer shell for a variety of reasons. You can simply type explorer . (don't forget the dot) at the prompt and a window will open that points at the current directory.

I got tired of typing that much and created a file called ex.bat that I dropped in my windows directory. You can put it anywhere in your path. Here is the contents of the batch file

@echo off
explorer .

Just copy the above, stick it in a text file and save it to c:\windows\ex.bat. Then typing ex at the command prompt will do the same as explorer .