DOS Commands You Should Know

So today we're going to be firing up the command prompt and I'm going to show you some really helpful commands that you probably should know about stay tuned [Music] the term dos simply means Disk Operating System that just means an operating system that runs from a disk however when most people are referring to Dos they're referring to MS-DOS and as you probably guessed that stood for Microsoft Disk Operating System yeah that's right back in the early days Microsoft really had a good imagination when they were naming their products they literally named their operating system operating system but you know what to be perfectly honest with you I don't think much has changed you know we have Windows 7 Windows 8 Windows not oh wait not never mind let's not go there let's get back to Dos dos or MS-DOS is the operating system PCS had before windows in fact it's the operating system PCS had with Windows because until Windows XP was released Windows literally ran on top of Dos today on Modern systems the only Remnant we have of MS-DOS is the command prompt even that Microsoft is trying to take away with the Powershell but luckily we still have the good old command prompt and while you can do a lot of things from within Windows there's no replacing the command prompt for many tasks in Windows machines so that's what we're going to be doing today but first we got to pay some bills so check out today's sponsor is your copy of Windows 10 unactivated well it doesn't have to be because with today's sponsor VIP SCD key you can get a valid Windows 10 license for under 20 dollars stop dealing with that stupid watermark on the desktop the valid license for Windows 10. also with an activated copy of Windows 10 you can upgrade to Windows 11 for free just go to the link in the description below and pick up a valid Windows 10 license key during checkout use the code cyber CPU for a 25 discount once you have your key go to your activation settings in Windows 10 and click on the link that says change product key enter the product key you just purchased and hit activate now you don't have to deal with that stupid Watermark that come with running an unactivated copy of Windows 10. now on with the video so the first thing we should probably do is cover some of the basics of the command prompt so let's jump on the computer and I'll show you a few things okay so the first thing that we need to do is open the command prompt up and to do that go ahead and click on your start button and just type CMD and then from here there's a couple different ways we can launch the command prompt we can either just click on the app and that'll give us the command prompt with our regular permissions or we can run it as administrator which will give you the ability to run commands at the highest privileges that are possible from within command prompt so we're going to go ahead and run this one as administrator so once we do that it wants you to say yes to the user account control go ahead and hit yes and it'll fire up your command prompt now from here there's a few things that we need to know to be able to kind of move around the command prompt and the first one is how to get into different directories and stuff like that and for that we use the command CD and that just means change directory and then we want to type in which directory we want to change to from this point so what I'm going to do is just hit the backslash command which stands for root and hit enter and that'll give us the root of our C drive or the very beginning of our C drive and then from there we want to be able to know what's inside the C drive for that we just type dir for directory and that'll give us a list of all the files that are in our C drive now alternatively what you could also do is type dir space and then put forward slash a and what that does is it'll give you every file of any attribute and it'll it'll include system files hidden files and things of that nature so if we hit enter as you can see there's a much bigger list now inside of our C drive right here of all the different files that we couldn't see before now alternatively I'm going to go ahead and hit CD Windows here to go into the windows directory now if you type dir at this point and hit enter as you can see there's a whole bunch of files and it Scrolls through a whole bunch of pages of files but because there's a lot of files within your windows directory if you want to break this down and make a little bit easier you can type dir switch for or forward slash and then the letter P and this will be for page and then when you hit enter it'll stop after one page is complete so as you can see it starts here and it comes down and says press any key to continue then when you press the key it goes on to the next page now if you ever want to cancel a command that's in the middle of doing what it's doing like we are doing right now just so go ahead and hit Ctrl C and that'll cancel the command and now we can also type CD space dot dot if we want to go back to the previous directory so we're going to go ahead and hit enter and now we're back to the root directory so now what we're going to do is I want to go ahead and navigate to my desktop so to do that we have to go into the users directory so we go CD users and hit enter that'll give us into the users directory and then if you want you can run a directory again to see what's in this directory and then hit enter and you can see we have two folders We have the public folder and my profile folder so for that we're going to go ahead and hit CD rich enter and that'll go into my profile and if we run a directory again it'll show us all the different folders from within that directory now here's another trick that you can use while you're moving through the command prompt and if you type in CD and just the first letter of the folder you want to go into so we want to go to desktop so in this case we're going to hit D if we hit the tab key it'll auto complete the word for us now as you notice we also have desktop documents and downloads well what if you wanted to go to downloads well if you just hit tab multiple times you can go ahead and it'll scroll through all the different directories that are named starting with the letter D now if you don't want to have to worry about that if you want to go directly to desktop you can always type D es or the first few letters in the name and hit Tab and it'll go straight to it then when you hit enter as you can see we're now in the desktop now the First Command that I want to show you here is how to create a directory so say we want to create a new directory on our desktop now to do that we're going to type MK for make and then dir for directory and then hit a space and then go ahead and name the directory whatever you want to name it so I'm going to write mine test and hit enter and as you can see right here we just created a folder on our desktop now let's say we want to move a file into that folder so as you can see right here we have our test document then we want to move this test document into our test folder so to do that all we do is type move space test dot txt space and then type the name of the folder you want to move it into so in this case it's going to be test and then we hit enter and it'll go ahead and move that file into that folder and as you can see it did in fact move the test file into the test folder probably should have named them different names to make it a little bit less confusing but hopefully you got it there now if we navigate into the test directory so if we go CD test it'll put us into that directory and then we can run a directory if we wanted to to see what's in it and as you can see we have the test text and now let's say we want to copy this to somewhere else say I want to copy it to my downloads folder so what I can do is I can write in copy and then I'm going to write test text space so an easy way to get into your downloads folder would be just to Simply say you want to go to root users root Rich root downloads and then hit enter and it'll go ahead and copy the file into your downloads folder so if we were to click right here and go into our downloads as you can see there's our test file right there so when you're working in the command prompt you can always use another Command 2 to help you out so if you type in help and then space and then whatever the name of the command is that you want to get help with like in this case we'll type dir and hit enter it'll go ahead and give you the help file associated with that specific command and as you can see there's several Pages here so you can kind of go through here and see all of the different switches that you can use with the dir command and if you hit enter again it'll go and finish at the end if for whatever reason the help command doesn't give you the help file associated with that command you can also do it a different way too if you type dir switch question mark and hit enter it'll also give you the same thing so there's a couple different ways to be able to get information on a command that you're using so the last command that I'm going to show you in our basic overview here is a really important one and that one is CLS and it stands for clear screen and if you hit enter it'll go ahead and clear the screen for you this will help to kind of clean things up if you have a bunch of commands that you've been running at once okay so now that we've covered the basics sometimes you might need more elevated privileges to run certain commands and sometimes you might not but let me show you how you can open the command prompt in different ways in order to get the Privileges that you need let's get back on the computer okay so we're going to go ahead and close the command prompt here and like I showed you before if you hit start and you type CMD you can just click on the command prompt normal and that'll just give you a normal command prompt that doesn't have any elevated privileges and if you click on run as administrator it'll give you an Administrator Command Prompt however let's just say you don't ever want to have to deal with opening a regular command prompt and every time you open it you just want it to run as administrator let me show you a really cool way to be able to make that happen so go ahead and right click on command prompt and click on open file location and then from there you'll get the shortcut for your command prompt and there all you got to do is right click click on properties and then from properties you want to click on Advanced and then from Advanced you want to check run as administrator then go ahead and hit OK hit OK again and then you can go ahead and close all this and at this point now if you type in CMD and you just click on command prompt like normal It'll ask you for administrator permissions and it'll open up an admin version of the command prompt however there's another way that you can do this as well that works really well so let's say you don't want to use the old CMD command but you want to use the new terminal command so if you open up terminal here as you can see it defaults into Powershell which is fine but if you want a command prompt you can click on this little tab right here and you can run a command prompt right there and it'll give you a regular command prompt however let's say you want an admin command prompt to be able to open when you open it in terminal to do that all you do is you hit this little arrow down right here go into settings and there's a couple different ways you can do this you can click on command prompt up scroll down and hit run this profile as administrator and what that'll do is once you hit save every time you open command prompt at this point it'll always ask for your user account control in order to give it administrator privileges to open an admin command prompt or you can also do this alternatively is if we go down to command prompt we're going to go ahead and uncheck this hit save and then I'm going to go ahead and click on the command prompt go down to add new profile here and then what we want to do is duplicate a profile so the for the duplicate profile we're going to select command prompt and we're going to go ahead and say duplicate and then from here for the name we're going to rename this instead of just saying copy we're going to rename this to admin and then we're going to scroll down and we're going to check run this profile as administrator and then go ahead and hit save right there now at that point you'll have two different selections so if you click on this little arrow right here as you can see you'll have command prompt or you'll have command prompt as admin now furthermore if you just don't want to mess with the Powershell you just want this thing to open in command prompt every time let me show you how to do that you go down hit settings right here or if you're already in settings it'll already be there and then from there you want to come up to the top where it says startup click on Startup and then where it says default profile you can select the default profile that terminal opens up with you can either have it be a regular command prompt or you can even have it be an admin command prompt if you want and then once you're done you go ahead and hit save and that'll save it as your default profile so in that case when we go ahead and close terminal here and we go ahead and open it again It'll ask for our user account control and then hit yes and it'll give you an admin command prompt just like that okay so now that we've gone over the basics and you know how to run the command prompt as either a regular user or an administrator let's get into some commands that you're actually going to need when fixing a computer many of these commands I use on almost a daily basis let me show you so the First Command that we're going to look at here is power CFG so if you just type power CFG and essentially all this stands for is power config and if you go ahead and hit space switch question mark it'll give you all the different options that you can use with power CFG however I'm going to show you a few of the ones that I like to use myself and another tip is if you're running the same command multiple times if you just hit the up Arrow it'll give you the last command that you actually ran so we're going to go ahead and we're going to try switch a and what this will show you is it'll show you the current power states that are currently enabled and supported on the system also if you go ahead and type in power CFG and then switch last wake it'll show you how many times the computer's been woken up since the last Boot and what the last device was that woke the system up and as you can see it was the USB controller obviously it was my keyboard now another command that you can use with power CFG we're going to go ahead and hit the up Arrow again and we're going to type in energy and that's just going to be e-n-e-r-g-y and then from there it's going to go ahead and it's going to give you an energy report for the system now this is going to take a minute to do so I'm going to go ahead and Skip ahead until this is done and I'll show you how you can check out the report all right here we go so as you can see our Energy report is going to be in users under Rich so if we go here we're going to go ahead and go to this PC go to C go to users and then go into my profile and then as you can see right here is an energy report we'll go ahead and double click on it and it'll give you a report of all the different energy specifics on your system I'm not going to bore you with all those specifics but gives you quite a bit of data for energy related topics so the next one that I'm going to show you is one that's equally as helpful if not more than that one right there and what I'm going to do is go ahead and hit up so we can get our Command back and then for this one I'm going to type battery report so you go b-a-t-t-e-r-y-r-e-p-o-r-t and go ahead and hit enter and it's going to go ahead and give you a battery life report and as you can see it saved it really fast that's probably because my system doesn't actually have a battery but if you have a notebook this will give you not only the different Power Cycles battery uses but it'll give you the health of the battery as well in this case it just gives me an empty report because I don't actually have a battery some of the other ways you can use this command and one way that I use this command all the time is by enabling and disabling different Power States on your computer let me show you that one so if you type power CFG and simply type the letter H this is for hibernate hit space and type off and what this will do is it'll turn hibernation off now this comes in really handy because if you want to disable your hybrid shutdown for whatever reason like for instance if you want to be able to recover data from the drive or be able to copy data to or from the drive from an external operating system like if you boot off like a Linux CD or something like that you have to turn off hybrid shutdown in order to get it to work and this is the way I typically do it is just by typing power CFG H off and that'll turn hibernation off now if you want to turn it back on it's the same thing you just type in power CFG h on and it'll turn hibernation back on now for the next command we're going to go ahead and hit CLS to clear our screen now the next command is shutdown now this one not actually going to run it because it'll mess up my screen recording however there's a few different switches that you can use for this command so if you type in shutdown and then afterwards type switch S what this will do is actually just shut the system down now if you type in switch R it will go through and do a reboot on the system however there's one more that comes in really handy if you type in shut down switch r space and then switch oh what this does is it puts you into an advanced startup this is how you can get into safe mode and things of that nature okay so moving on for our next command we're going to look at the system file Checker now this one I went into way more detail with this one in a previous video but I'm going to go ahead and give you just some of the really basic commands that you can use with this one so first off we're going to go sfc forward slash verify only and what this will do is it'll go through and it'll verify your system files and it'll take a minute to complete so I'm going to go ahead and let this one complete real quick and then I'll get back to you so once verification is complete you can see that it actually did find some stuff wrong so the way that we fix that is by simply typing sfc space and then forward slash scan now and then what that will do is it'll go through and actually do a system scan unfortunately do the verification phase again but once it finishes the verification phase it will actually fix the problem so I'm going to go ahead and let this one finish again and this time we'll have it fix whatever Integrity violations it found and then we'll move on to the next command okay there we go now it finished up it said it found corrupt files and successfully repaired them so we can move on to the next one however if for whatever reason it found corrupted files but was unable to fix them that's where dism comes in now di SM simply stands for the deployment Imaging servicing and management tool and this one right here I'm not going to get into this tool right now because I did an entire video on how to do this so I'm going to go ahead and just direct you to that videos because I give a much more detailed explanation of sfc and dism in that video however if you ever do run into that problem that's how you fix it is with dism now the next command we're going to look at is check disk and this is a way where you can check your hard drive for different errors and to run it all you do is type in chkdsk for check disk and then there's a couple different switches you can use if you want you can always hit switch question mark and be able to get all the different switches all at once however the ones that you're going to need most of the time are going to be be switch F which checks the file system itself or switch R which actually checks for bad sectors now switch R is automatically going to imply switch F was used in the first place so I typically use switch R because you know it gives a more thorough scan of the drive however switch F will be faster but it won't check for bad sectors now the next command that we're going to look at is system info and essentially it does exactly what you think it does we're going to type in system info and it'll go through and it'll run all the different information for your system itself so if we're going to go ahead and scroll through here you'll be able to see all the different things about this system not only the operating system information but also different Hardware information like for instance the kind of processor the system has the amount of memory the system has and even the time zone that the system is set up to use so this is a really useful tool if you just want basic system information for the computer that you're currently using so as you can see there are several commands that are extremely important for repairing systems however the command prompt also comes in really handy when you're troubleshooting network problems so let's jump back on the computer and I'll show you some of the most commonly used commands for Network troubleshooting okay so just like before we're going to type CLS to clear our screen here and I'm going to show you some really basic commands for Network troubleshooting now the first one that everyone should know is ipconfig so if you type in IP config first off I would highly recommend that you spell it right and to do that you type in IP config and it'll go ahead and give you your IP information so as you can see here it shows my my DNS right here and I'm going to have this blanked out right here but on yours you'll have your own specific one it'll also show you your local addresses your local IP addresses for your system now if you want to have more information than that you can also go ipconfig switch all and it'll give you a ton of information including your physical physical Mac address as well as a bunch of different IPS even comes down and gives you your DNS servers that you're currently using as well as when your lease was obtained and when it expires for your IP address itself now speaking of your lease if for whatever reason you need to renew your lease for your IP address then what you would do is you would type ikey ipconfig and then you would use the switch and you would do release and what this will do is essentially boot you off the internet now to get back what you're going to want to do is go ahead and type in renew and it'll go ahead and connect back to the internet and get a new IP address for you and there we go now some of the other switches for ipconfig that can come in handy is for instance you can view your DNS cache and if you want to do that you go ahead and hit ipconfig switch display DNS and this will go ahead and it'll show you your DNS cache these are all the different DNS requests that Windows has made in order to associate different domain names to different IP addresses now if you want you can flush the DNS cache if you're having problems with your DNS which happens a lot more often than you might think so we're going to go ahead and hit up Arrow again to get our Command back and we're going to type in flush DNS and what that will do is it will essentially flush the DNS cache that we just looked at before so if we run that again you can see there is no DNS cache because we flushed it now moving on we're going to look at the command netstat so if we type in netstat now I'm going to use the switch which in this case it uses a dash for switch instead of a forward slash we're going to type a n and what that's going to show us is it's going to show us all of the different ports that are open on our system right now so if we come up here if we scroll through this you can see that all of these different ports right here are currently listening and some actually have things established on that Porsche that Port specifically so you can get all of your Port information and the different IP addresses that are connected to that Port right here so as you can see we do have some remote IP addresses that are currently connected on different ports now speaking of different IP addresses what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and we're going to look at the Ping command now what the Ping command does is it essentially sends some random packets just to be able to test if we're getting network connectivity between two IP addresses so what I'm going to do is I'm going to type ping 8.8.8.8 and what this is this is Google right here so if we hit enter it's going to to go ahead and ping Google four times so by default it always sends four ping requests however if for whatever reason you decide you want to make more than that then what you can do is you can type in ping dash n and then give it a specific number so I'm going to type in five and then I'm going to type in 8.8.8.8 again and we're going to hit enter and in this case what it's going to do is it's actually going to make five ping requests to Google instead of the four now let's say that you don't want to have to deal with that you just want it to Ping continuously forever now the way you would do that is you would go ping Dash t and then you would type the IP address you wanted to Ping and then hit enter and at this point it will ping forever or at least until it's interrupted now if you want to interrupt this command all you have to do is go ahead and hit Ctrl C and it'll interrupt it and at that point it'll give you the the rundown of what it found any packets that it lost or whatever the minimum maximum and average milliseconds were now the next one that we're going to move on to is path ping now what this is going to do is this is going to give you all of the different routers that are connected between you and the IP address that you want to find so for that we're going to type in pathping and we're going to use the same IP address Google we're going to hit enter and then what it's going to do is it's going to go through all of the different IP addresses that it has to go to in order to get to that IP address and as you can see there's quite a few right here that it has to jump through but it'll give you all the different jumps that need to happen before it can reach the IP address that you're asking it to look for okay so the next command we're going to look at now is going to be a command called tracert and this essentially just means trace route but it's spelled Trace RT or tracert and we're going to go ahead and hit enter we're going to type 8.8.8.8 again and hit enter again and what this does is essentially the same thing as ping path but this one gives us a little bit more information like for instance it gives us it gives us the milliseconds in which it takes to respond to the different servers that it goes through But ultimately it's going to give us the same information that we got from ping path before now one option that you can make also is if you type Dash D for Tracer it won't actually resolve the DNS numbers and as you can see I did it wrong here you have to put it before the IP address not after it so if we put Dash D here it'll go ahead and do the same thing again but it won't resolve the the domain names themselves so it'll make the app kind of go a little bit quicker so it'll get to the end a little bit faster so as you can see there are tons of things that you can do from within the command prompt in fact there are many tasks that you can only do from the command prompt so don't be afraid to familiarize yourself with DOS commands they can be extremely helpful and also if there are any commands that you think I should have mentioned then make sure that you mention them down in the comments below I may make a sequel to this video now earlier in the video I said that I did a much better video on sfc and dism if you'd like to check that video out then go ahead and click here there's also a second part to that video that shows how to do the same thing from recovery believe it or not it's two different processes as always you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 65,394

Keywords: ms dos, Microsoft dos, dos commands, ms dos commands, basic dos commands, windows command, windows command prompt, windows command line, command prompt, cmd commands, command prompt tricks

Id: _km5A8KC5e0

Length: 27min 13sec (1633 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 14 2023