Using the command prompt may seem extremely "old school" but there are still some commands that are faster and more powerful than their graphical counterparts. Here are some of the most useful, supported commands in XP:
(Remember the command prompt can be brought up by hitting the Start button, going to Run, and typing CMD in the run dialog box.)
ipconfig - Windows IP configuration - Useful for troubleshooting your internet connection. Displays the current IP address of your computer and the DNS server address. If you call your ISP for reporting a bad internet connection, he will probably ask you to run ipconfig.
fc - FC is an advanced DOS Command that compares two files and displays the differences between them. You can even set fc to resynchronize the files after finding a mismatch.
type - Displays the contents of a text file in the command window.
ping - Ping network command followed by the web-address or IP address tells you about the health of the connection and whether the other party is responding to your handshake request. Ping tool can also be used to convert the web address to a physical IP address.
tree - Visual directory structure - You often need to take prints of your physical directory structure but XP has no simple "visual" commands for printing directory contents. Here, try the Tree DOS command and redirect the output to a text file.
tree > mydirectory.txt
print mydirectory.txt
attrib - Attrib lets you change attributes of System files and even hidden files. This is great for troubleshooting Windows XP.
assoc - Which program will open that .xyz file - The assoc DOS command can be used to either display or even modify the file name extension associations.
move - More flexible than copy-paste - For instance, if you have a lot of XLS and DOC files in the 'My Documents' folder and want to move only those XLS files that have their name ending with 2006, Just type the following at the command prompt:
move *2006.xls c:\2006Reports\
This is far superior to manually selecting all the documents you would like from Windows Explorer and using cut\paste.
find - Find is the most powerful DOS command. The find command searches for a specific string of text in a file or files. After searching the specified file or files, find displays any lines of text that contain the specified string.
To search your hard disk to find and display the file names on drive C: that contain the string "Google" use the pipe (|) to direct the results of a dir command to find as follows:
dir c:\ /s /b | find "Google"
Other tips for using the command line:
Drag to avoid typing: When your command acts on a file or folder, you must type the path to that folder after the command. You can save typing time by dragging the file or folder from Windows Explorer into the command window.
To view help at the command-line, at the command prompt, type the following:
CommandName /?
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