Some Windows Command prompt Commands and Usage

Introduction to CMD

CMD is an acronym for Command. Command prompt or CMD is the command line interpreter of Windows operating systems. It is similar to Command.com used in DOS and Windows 9x systems where it is called as “MS-DOS Prompt”. It is analogous to Unix Shells used on Unix like system. The command prompt is a native application of the Windows operating system and gives the user an option to perform operations using commands.

Command prompt makes use of the command line interface to interact with the User. In the Windows operating system, this command prompt interface is implemented through the Win32 console. User can open the interface by via the CMD run command or by going to its original location C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe.

Let’s see some of the useful windows commands and their usage

Command	Description
Ping	If you want to test the network connectivity between two systems say source and destination then you can use the ping command. It sends an ICMP or Internet Control Message Protocol to the destination system and waits for the response in the form of packets.
Netstat	It displays the active TCP connections, ports on which the system is currently listening.
Ipconfig	Ipconfig is one of the most used commands. It displays network configuration values like current TCP/IP. It also allows you to refresh the Domain Name System and Dynamic Host Configurations.
PathPing	PathPing is used to determine the network issues in any router or subnets. If there is any packet loss in between the multiple hops between a source and the destination system PathPing can determine and display results based on the packets returned from individual routers or subnets.
Tracert	Tracert command traces the path of the destination system from which it receives the packets of information as a response.
append	Append is similar to the Path command of MS-DOS. It allows you to access the files present in a different directory as if it is present in the current directory.
getMac	This command comes handy if you want to know the physical address or the mac address of the system. It can also determine the address for the remote systems.
diskcopy	As the name suggests it allows the programmer to copy the contents of one floppy disk into other.
dir	Dir indeed is the most useful command out of all. It let you populate all the files and subfolders that are present inside a folder.
driverquery	It enables the administrator to display a list of installed device drivers and their properties.
tasklist	With tasklist, you can check all the processes that are currently running either in local desktop or in a remote machine.
cipher	If there is a requirement to alter the encryption or to display the existing encryption strategy cipher can be used.
PRN jobs	It adds, deletes and lists printer driver.
change	It changes the remote desktop session host server settings for logons, COM port mapping and installs mode.
NSLookup	Nslookup displays the information which can be used to diagnose the DNS or domain name system infrastructure. The nslookup command will only work if you have installed the TCP/IP protocol.
Taskkill	To kill any active tasks or process that appears on the task manager can be killed with the help of this command. It makes use of process ID to kill the tasks.
mstsc	With mstsc, you can establish a connection with a remote desktop from your local system.
rdpsign	With rdpsign, User can digitally sign an rdp file present on a remote desktop.
shadow	With shadow, one can have access to the remote desktop session remotely.
tscon	With tscon, one can connect to another session on a remote system.
tskill	Like taskkill commands which kills or remove the currently running processes or task in the local desktop tskill kill the processor tasks in a remote desktop.
nfsadmin	It manages the server for NFS and client for NFS
nfsstat	It displays or reset counts of calls made to the server for NFS
rpcinfo	It list programs on remote computers.