Windows Command Prompt

Windows Command Prompt

By Murat Yıldırımoğlu

Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE)

Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT)

Copyright 2018 Murat Yildirimoglu

Windows is a great operating system.

As the name implies, there are windows on the screen and we do our work by clicking on something in these windows.

But, Windows has a powerful command prompt also.

We are not Linux guys; we do not prefer command prompt over graphical environment but we should learn how to do things in the command prompt.

You can do almost everything in the command prompt.

And some operations can only be done in the command prompt.

For example, converting a file system on a disk from FAT to NTFS can only be done using convert.exe in the command prompt.

General syntax of the commands follows the English sentence syntax and is as the following:

Command Object Target Parameters

Let’s give an example to explain this syntax.

Assume that you want copy all the files in F: drive to Accounting folder in the C: drive.

Then the command must be:

COPY F:*.* C:\ACCOUNTING

Command Object Target

This command sentence starts with command COPY.

After that, we state the file to be copied. F:*.* means all the files in F: drive.

Then we indicate where we want the files to be pasted: C:\ACCOUNTING.

If we follow this syntax, operations become easy.

There must be at least one space between command, object, and target.

More than one space is not necessary but allowed.

In the example, all the characters are uppercase.

But you can use lowercase letters as well as uppercase.

Commands are in general, case insensitive.

Only a couple of commands are sensitive to uppercase and lowercase letters.

Now, we’ll have some more examples to see the command prompt in action.

1) We want to see the list of the files in F: drive. The command:

DIR F:

Command Object

In the above example, there is no target because all we want is to get a list of files.

2) F: drive has a folder named PSAV. There are many files under that folder as well as a subfolder named VIRUS. We want to copy PSAV folder with all the files and subfolders under it to PSAV folder under C:\UTIL folder. The command is:

XCOPY F:\PSAV C:\UTIL\PSAV /S

Command Object Target Parameters

The command is XCOPY, not COPY.

The reason