Minificação, or minification, is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code without changing its functionality. This includes removing whitespace, comments, and shortening variable names. Minification is crucial for web development as it reduces the file size, leading to faster load times and improved performance.

While minification is typically associated with web development environments like Node.js, it can also be performed on a Windows system using various tools and scripts. This article will guide you on how to minify JavaScript and CSS files using Windows Command Prompt (CMD) and PowerShell.

Examples:

1. Using Node.js and UglifyJS for JavaScript Minification

   First, ensure you have Node.js installed on your Windows machine. You can download it from Node.js official website.

   Open Command Prompt and install UglifyJS:

   npm install -g uglify-js

   To minify a JavaScript file named example.js, use the following command:

   uglifyjs example.js -o example.min.js

   This command will create a minified version of example.js named example.min.js.

2. Using Node.js and Clean-CSS for CSS Minification

   Similarly, you can install Clean-CSS for minifying CSS files:

   npm install -g clean-css-cli

   To minify a CSS file named style.css, use the command:

   cleancss -o style.min.css style.css

   This will generate a minified version of style.css named style.min.css.

3. Using PowerShell for Simple Minification

   For simpler minification tasks, you can use PowerShell scripts. Below is an example script to minify a JavaScript file:

   $inputFile = "C:\path\to\your\example.js"
   $outputFile = "C:\path\to\your\example.min.js"
   $content = Get-Content $inputFile -Raw
   $minifiedContent = $content -replace "\s+", " " -replace "/\*.*?\*/", ""
   Set-Content -Path $outputFile -Value $minifiedContent

   This script removes extra whitespace and comments from the JavaScript file.