A Beginners Guide to the Command Prompt

A Beginners Guide to the Command Prompt

  • Submitted By: balu26gb
  • Date Submitted: 12/30/2013 1:52 AM
  • Category: Technology
  • Words: 3894
  • Page: 16
  • Views: 50

A beginners guide to the Command Prompt
Most Windows users don’t know what the Command Prompt is or how to use it. This is a beginners guide to using the Command Prompt.
What is the Command Prompt? The Command Prompt is a native Windows program that lets you execute commands without using a GUI. You can accomplish pretty much every task you can do using Windows and the mouse from within the Command Prompt. The Command Prompt gets its roots (arguably) from a combination of MS-DOS and UNIX. Consider it “Windows without the windows. ” I will provide you with a beginners tutorial of some simple commands to familiarize you with the Command Prompt.

The first step is to actually open the Command Prompt. You can do this by going to Start >> All Programs >> Accessories >> Command Prompt. You should get a screen that resembles mine below:

You should see a blinking cursor after a line that says C:\Documents and Settings\username. This is used to identify what directory you are currently in. This also brings us to our first three commands cd, dir, and .. (two periods). Let’s start with dir — “dir” stands for directory. Type dir into the command prompt to see a listing of the directories and files located in your “username” directory.
After you type in dir you will see a listing of several folders including Desktop, Favorites and My Documents. “CD” stands for change directory. So in order to change to our “My Documents” folder we need to type cd My Documents, give it a try. You will now notice that your path has changed to C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents. To see a list of all the files in your My Documents directory type dir. If you want to move back into your username folder use the “back” command. You can move back by typing cd .. See the image below:

That’s a good introduction, but lets actually go over some useful commands: copy, del, mkdir, rmdir, ren. “CP” stands for copy and it can be used to copy individual files from one...

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