A Compilation of Command Prompt Tips, Tricks & Cool Things You Can Do

[ZeroThunderbolt]

Excellent article. I did not know about the ASCII thing. Is very hilarious to watch.

 

[Bassfreak25]

One of my favourite commands for troubleshooting wireless is:

netsh wlan show wlanreport

 

[rajaram]

Nice article......need to see in pdf it will be useful to all

 

[TristaK7]

Wow!! I'm pretty new to the IT field so I was curious about the abilities of the Command Prompt and had no idea someone made a whole Star Wars movie among others!! So Cool! This article was very helpful for me and I thank you for taking the time to explain such a neat part of computers that no one even knows about and can be really helpful. Thanks Again!! Mind Blown!

 

[Yuzer]

The workaround for bootrec /fixboot. -- Access Denied:
After
bootrec /fixboot
Access Denied,
Next 5 cmds:
bcdedit /export c:\bcdbackup
attrib c:\boot\bcd -h -r -s
ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
bootrec /scanos
bootrec /rebuildbcd
bootrec /fixboot should be accessible.

 

[koblongata]

Gasp, Magic.

 

[harm9963]

Little Mem bench winsat mem
https://scontent.fhou1-1.fna.fbcdn....=07a88ca16588b4a0873b3f3d7c8a89d3&oe=5FBF2718

 

[Neatfeatguy]

Ncpa.cpl is dug into my head like a screw.

You don't even need to use that in the command prompt to launch the network connections window.

ncpa.cpl was my go to way of getting remote customers that were offline into the network connections window instead of trying to have them slowly navigate with a handful of mouse clicks and hoping they follow commands. Have them click on the start button or click in the "search bar" by the start button and type in "ncpa.cpl".

Once that network connections window was open it was an easy right click, choose properties and find IPv4 to get them into configuring the necessary static IPs to get the computer back on the network and online.

This was a fun article to go through. I remember a lot of these commands from the good old DOS days, but I have rarely needed use of any of these for many years and forget they even exist.

 

[Ozmiz]

Excellent compilation.

It's worth noting, "ipconfig" told alone is a quick way to see your ip information, dns, gateway is, etc.

Also, I may have missed it, but any of those commands with /? will show you the syntax for the command, along with all switches.
Example: dir /?

 

[DonquixoteIII]

While I might critique, I also give accolades. This was a well researched, presented and most useful article Keep up the good works..

 

[EClyde]

May as well use linux if you're going to do this stuff

 

[Crazy4Ciri]

I heartily second that request. PDF Please !

If you're using Chromium based browser, just press Ctrl + P and in Destination - Save as PDF.

 

[p51d007]

Windows has sort of made us "lazy" in a way. I started with dos 3.x and by the time windows 95 came along I could write my own autoexec.bat & config.sys files from memory (back in the day some dos games required tweaking the himem.sys & sound blaster settings to get that magic 604K memory to run properly. Tweaking win.ini, modem AT& commands and on and on.
Now, about the only time I go to a dos prompt, is when for whatever reason a website won't load so I'll type in the ipconfig/flushdns command to see if that fixes it LOL

 

[sorten]

Nice list. It's already been mentioned at least once, but time to move up to Terminal. The console shell is getting some love from Microsoft soon (if not already), but Terminal is a beautiful shell host and you can launch PowerShell, cmd, bash, git, WSL2 sessions, etc. on tabs. Do yourselves a favor and switch if you're spending any time in the shell.

 

[Mowserx]

TIP to everyone: You can create your own PDF when necessary by right clicking on a web page and selecting PRINT as long as you have a PDF Printer device installed. Many programs will allow you to install them (PDF Editors / Viewers, Quicken, etc.) or do a google search to find one.

I have saved this article into a PDF file that you can download (if I did it right).
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14JTscikvgc-TMMZXy_pjWiVOYMXCAWCB/view?usp=sharing

Also, as another tip, I had to use uBlock (my Ad Blocker) to block some elements on this article's webpage first (ads making the PDF longer, banners that kept showing on every page and covering the 1st few lines of each page, links to other stories that aren't needed in the PDF, etc.) to get the PDF to come out nice and concise. Then I unblocked the items so as to put the TechSpot webpages back to normal.

I use https://www.printfriendly.com/ to clean up web pages before exporting to PDF. I use it all of the time.

 

[Guyver1wales]

A Compilation of Command Prompt Tips, Tricks & Cool Things You Can Do because you're a 20 year+ sysadmin stuck in their ways who couldn't be bothered to learn PowerShell...
#cynical

 

[I AM THAT I AM]

An excellent resource for beginners! It would be very helpful if you could provide all the DISM commands (set).