Most of the time when
you're using Windows, you'll be working in a
graphical environment. There may be times when a
command line is the only option available to you. So in this video, we'll look
at some of the most popular Microsoft command line tools. As you're probably aware,
the Windows operating system has two separate
privileges-- one for the user and one for the administrator. For most of what you do, you'll
be using standard privileges. But there are
certain applications and certain functions in
the operating system that need elevated permissions. And in those cases, you'll want
to run as an administrator. To be able to run at the command
prompt as an administrator, you'll first need to be a member
of the administrator's group. And then you'll
need to right click the command prompt and
choose Run as Administrator. There's also a
shortcut you can use, which is to type the
cmd command and then choose Control Shift
Enter to run that command as an administrator. Here's a command prompt that
I'm running on Windows 10 that I'm running with
administrator permissions. And you can see that it says
Administrator Command Prompt at the top of the screen. To be able to do this, I
started down at the bottom, I typed cmd-- that would be for
the command prompt. Windows 10 does show me
the command prompt is here, but instead of left
clicking the command prompt, I'm going to right mouse
click and choose "Run as administrator,"
and when I do that, Windows will ask me if I
would like to allow this app-- which in this case would
be the command prompt-- to make changes to your device. This is your warning
that you're going to be performing functions
at this command prompt that could make drastic changes
to the operating system. So we're going to choose Yes. And our command prompt will
open in a separate window. And now we can begin
using that command prompt with elevated privileges. The command prompt is a
daunting environment to work in. There's no graphical
interface, and it's difficult to memorize all of
the different options that might be available for
a particular command. For that reason, the operating
system includes a help command. So if you'd like help on
the directory command, you can type help dir. Or if you need help
on the copy command, you can type help
copy, and you'll get all of this
information about how to run that particular command. Another shortcut
to using this help is to type in the name of
the command, and then use /? which will bring
up the same screen as typing help and the
name of the command. Once you're finished
using the command prompt, if you'd like to close out
the command prompt window, you simply type exit
and press Enter. These help commands
are useful when you're working at
the command prompt and you need a little
bit more information. Some of this information
may or may not be available on
your exam, so it's important to memorize as
much of this as possible. Let's look at all of
the different options available for the copy command. I'll type help and copy. And we'll see all of the
syntax and all of the options available when using copy. Now let's get the same
information by using the /?. I'll type cls to
clear the screen, and then we'll type the copy
command with a space and a /? to view exactly the
same help information. When you're working
at the command prompt, you may want to list out all
of the files that happen to be in your current directory. And you can do that by
typing the dir command. You can also move
between directories by using the cd command for
change working directory. You can combine this
with the backslash to specify a volume or a
series of subdirectories that you'd like to move to. And if you're currently
in a working directory and you would like to move
or reference a directory just above that, you can use
the two dots or two periods to specify that
you'd like to use the folder above the
current working folder. Let's use the dir command
to list out some files that happen to be in this directory. I'm currently in the working
directory of c: backslash Users backslash Professor. This means that I
am in the c: drive. The drive letter is c. And then the folder that I'm
in is in the Users folder. And within the Users folder, I
am within the Professor folder. Let's use the dir command. And we can list out all of
the different directories that are located in this
Professor folder. You can see that one of these
is the Documents folder. So now let's use the cd
command to change directory to the Documents folder. And when I hit Enter, you'll
see that my working directory has changed to Users
Professor Document. And if I perform
the dir command, I'll list out all of the
directories and files that will be located within
that Document subfolder. If I would like to
change directory back to that previous
directory that's just above this current
working directory, I can use the cd command again. And of course, I could type
in backslash Users backslash Professor, or I could use the
shortcut of typing cd space .. To specify the
previous directory. And you can see that
the working directory has changed to Users Professor. Most of the time when we want
to shut down our computer, we can choose the shut down
option on our desktop or we can reach down and
press the power button. But very often,
you'll be working on a computer that's
located in a different room, a different building, or
a different city or state where you may be located. In those cases, you may
want to shut down or reboot the computer from the command
line using the shutdown command. The shutdown command has a
number of different options you should know about. We'll be using shutdown
as the command. We can use the /s option after
typing in shutdown to specify that we're going to completely
shut down this computer once the timer has completed. And then we will use the
/t to specify this timer, where it will wait a certain
number of seconds before it shuts down. So if we'd like it to
shut down in 60 seconds, we would use the shutdown
command with a /s, a /t, and then 60. If we want the computer to
reboot after shutting down, then we want to use the /r
command instead of using the /s. And we would still have
the /t command that will be our countdown timer until
the system does restart. There may be times while
this timer is counting down when you realize you
don't want to restart or you don't want to
shut down right now. And you can abort this entire
sequence by using the shutdown /a command. Let's use the shutdown command
to shut down our local computer that's sitting in front of us. We'll you shutdown. I'm going to use the /r command
to restart the computer. And then I'll specify
a time of 120 seconds. And when I press Enter, anybody
who's connected to this machine will get a message on
the screen that says, "You're about to be signed out. Windows will shut
down in 2 minutes." And it says when the
shutdown will start. To be able to abort
this shutdown, we would use the same command,
shutdown, but with the /a. And Windows will prompt us and
say the log off is canceled. The scheduled shutdown
has been canceled because we use the "a" to
abort the shutdown sequence. Another command line you
may come across is dism. This stands for the Deployment
Image Servicing and Management tool. There's a standard Windows
imaging format called a WIM. This stands for the
Windows Imaging Format. And the dism command allows
you to make changes, view the files, and perform
other functions associated with these WIM images. If you need to install new
applications to an image, you need to install
new drivers, or change any of the updates
inside of that image, you would use this dism command. To be able to view the whole
scope of the dism command, I'm going to type dism with
no other parameters and press Enter, and pages of
information will go by. I'm going to scroll back up
until we get all the way back to the top of dism. You can see all of
the options, what the description of this command
is, all of the generic imaging commands, the WIM commands-- and there are pages of those-- the ffu commands, the
image specifications, the dism options, and some
examples at the bottom. Let's perform one of
these dism commands to look at the specifications of
an existing Windows image file. Let's use the dism command. I'm going to use a /Get-WIMInfo. And then I'm going to
use the /WIMfile:d: backslash sources
backslash boot.wim. Let's break down
what I've typed in. I first specified
the dism command. I then told this
command that I'd like to get WIMInfo
or the information from a Windows Image File. And then I specified the
location of that file by putting in the /WIMfile: and
then the location of the WIM file, which happens to be on
d: backslash sources backslash boot.wim. And when I press Enter,
you can see there are two indices for this file. There's index number
1 and index number 2. There's a Microsoft Windows PE
in this first part of the index file. And you can see the size in
bytes of that particular part of the image. And then there's a
Microsoft Windows Setup x64. So this is the image file that's
used for the Windows setup. And you can view
all the information about that and more
using the dism command. There may be times when
you're working on a computer where you're concerned that the
core operating system files may be damaged or corrupted. Maybe malware had previously
infected the system, or maybe a Windows update
didn't complete properly. One way that you could scan
all of the core operating system files is to
use the sfc command. That stands for
System File Checker. And sfc will scan through
all of those important files, locate any that may
be damaged, and repair any of those damaged files. Let's look at all the different
options for the sfc command. You can see that you have
an option to scan now, to only verify the files
but don't repair the files. We can scan individual files
and verify individual files. Or we can do offline
repairs as well. One of the common
commands you would use would be the sfc
with the scannow. Let's try that-- sfc /scannow
and we'll press Enter. And now the sfc command
processes the scan, looks through all of
your operating system, and locates any files
that may be corrupted. If it does run
into a problem, it will repair it with
this scannow command. And as you can see, this
takes quite a bit of time to go through all of those
operating system files. But once this scan
is complete, you'll know that you have a good
working operating system. As the name implies,
the chkdsk command will check your disk for errors. One of the type of
checks that it performs is a logical file system check. You can perform that
check by using chkdsk /f. The other type of check it can
do is much more comprehensive. It will not only check for
logical file system, errors but it will try to find
any bad sectors that may exist on your storage drive. And if it finds a
bad sector, it will try to recover the
data in that bad sector and write it to a
known good sector. If you run the chkdsk /r, it
will first perform the logical file system check. And then it will perform
the much more intensive sector-by-sector
check of your drive. Chkdsk needs to have
complete control of the drive to perform these checks. So if you are using an
operating system on a drive and you're trying to run a
chkdsk disk on that same drive, you'll get a message
on your screen that says, "Chkdsk can't run
because the volume is in use by another process. Would you like to
schedule this volume to be checked the next
time the system restarts?" And you can choose Yes or No. If you choose Yes, the volume
will be checked the next time you restart this computer. When you start back up,
you'll get a message on your screen that
says that Windows is scanning and
repairing the drive and will tell you how complete
it is during that process. There's many programs available
in the graphical front end of the Windows
operating system that allows you to manage the
partitions on your storage drives. But if you're working
at the command line, you still need to have
this functionality, even though the graphical
utility isn't available. From the command line, the
utility you want to use is diskpart. This will open up a number
of different options available for managing
your storage devices. To start diskpart,
we'll type "diskpart" at the command prompt. And we'll get a diskpart prompt. There are many different
options available in diskpart. If we type "help," you can get
a summary of those options. If you want to create a volume
partition or virtual disk, you can use the create command. If you want to
format a partition, you can use the format command. If we want to list the
different objects that are available on this particular
drive, we can type list. And if we don't put
any options down, you'll see the different
options available. For example, if you want
to type list volume, you'll see all of the
different Windows volumes available on this
particular computer. Once you're done
with diskpart, you want to exit back to
the operating system, you simply type exit
and press Enter. You may be accustomed to
using Task Manager inside of the Windows graphical desktop
to-- be able to manage tasks But you can also manage
tasks by using the tasklist and the taskkill command. The tasklist command will
show you the currently running processes. And you can either
choose to look at those processes on
your local computer or you can specify the
processes on a remote computer. You can then use the taskkill
command to terminate tasks. And you can either use
the name of the executable or the process ID, or PID, to
be able to specify exactly which process you'd like to terminate. To terminate a process
using its executable name, we would use taskkill with
the /im and then the name of the executable. Or if you'd like to use the
process ID, use taskkill /pid, the process ID
number, and then /t. On my computer, I'm
still running the command prompt that's running with the
elevated administrator access. And you can see on the
left side of the screen is an instance of Notepad. If I type in
tasklist, we can see all of the different
processes running on this computer, including
down here at the bottom an instance of notepad.exe. I could choose the
option to remove all of the tasks associated
with that executable, but there might
be other notepads running on this computer
at the same time. What I'd like to do is
specify this specific process. And I know that
the process ID is going to be 3192 for
this notepad.exe. So let's run taskkill. I'm going to specify the PID
of 3192 and then specify /t to terminate that process. And when I press Enter, you'll
see that notepad.exe is now terminated. If you're the
system administrator of a number of different
Windows machines, you're probably managing those
systems using Microsoft Active Directory. Active Directory allows you to
implement group policies which allows the administrator to
control almost every aspect of the operating system. When a user logs
into their computer, these group policies are updated
with all of the configurations that the system
administrators have made. There may be times when the
system administrator would like to force a particular
set of updates on a computer, perhaps in the middle of the
day after someone has already logged in. To be able to do that, they
can use the gpupdate command, which will force a group
policy update to a computer. To do this, you'd use the
gpupdate with a /target and the name of the computer
or the name of the user. And then you use /force to
force that group policy update. For example, for my
particular username, I would use the gpupdate
/target:professor and /force. You can also look at the
group policy settings on a particular user or
a particular computer by using the gpresult command. For instance, gpresult /r will
show the group policy settings on that computer. Or it can specify a particular
user in a particular domain to be able to look at the
results of group policy on a remote device. Let's look at the group policy
settings on my local computer. I'll use the gpresult /r. And it will compile the
information about group policy and show what the results
are of that particular query. If I scroll up to
the top, you can see this is a standalone
workstation running Windows 10. I can look at computer settings. I can see if any group
policy objects have been applied to this system. And since the system is
not under an active domain infrastructure, I don't have
any group policies assigned. I can see security group
information, user settings, and other information that's
important for understanding how group policy
has been applied to this individual system. Another useful command line
utility is the format command. This is the command
you'll use to write a file system to a partition. This is a very
useful command when you're initializing a
disk, but you should also be aware that this command will
delete anything on that disk. So be very careful when
using the format command that you don't delete or format
over the wrong partition. On my computer, I plugged
in a new USB drive that's drive E. If I do
a directory of drive E, you'll see that it does not
contain a recognized file system. So I'll use the format command. I'll specify e: and
I'll press Enter. It asks me to insert a new disk
for drive E, which is already there, and press
Enter when ready. It's now going to perform
format with all of the default options which will write a fat
32 partition to this USB drive. The copy command is used to
copy a file or a series of files from one directory to another. This can be on the
same storage device or it can copy to a
different storage device. There are a number of different
options available for the copy command. Today we're going to
look at two of them. One is the /v option, and
the other is the /y option. /v when you include that on the
copy command will verify that the files that you've copied
were copied correctly. This is something that's
useful to do, especially if you're copying to an external
storage device or a device that you want to
make sure is getting a good copy of that file. The other option is /y. This will suppress
any options that may come up to overwrite
what may already exist on a destination file. In the example that we're
about to do, I'll copy a file, and then I'll try to
copy the file again. And you'll see the copy command
will prompt us if we really want to overwrite that
file, I can force that to be overwritten by using
that /y option. For this copy command, I want to
copy a single file that I have, which is p3k-447-report.log. And I want to copy this to my
E drive, which is my USB drive. Because I'm copying
this important file, I want to be sure
to use the v command to verify that the file
was copied properly to that USB drive. So I'll start with the
copy command with a /v. And then I'll specify the name
of the file that I would like to copy, which is
p3k-447-report.log. Then I'll specify
the destination for this copy command,
which would be my E drive, and I'll press Enter. And you can see that
one file was copied. Since we used the /v, we know
that not only was the file copied, but it was verified once
the file was copied to that E drive. If I use the up arrow and I
perform this exact same copy command again, you'll see that
the copy command recognizes that this file already exists
on that destination drive. And it says, do I want to
overwrite that particular file? And you can choose yes,
no, or to overwrite all of the remaining files
in this copy command. For this option, I'm
going to choose yes to overwrite that file, and the
exact same copy takes place. There may be times when you want
to automate these files to be copied, so you
may want to bypass that prompt that comes up. So I'll choose the
copy command with a /v, and I'll include the /y
which tells the copy command if you're ever prompted
with a conflict, go ahead and choose the yes
command to overwrite that file. Then I'll choose exactly the
same options as I had before-- the p3k-447-report.log /e:. And now when I press Enter,
I'm not prompted at all. It simply overrides the file
during the copy process. If I look at my E
drive now, you can see that it contains
that report file. If you want to copy multiple
files and multiple directories at a single time, you may
want to use the xcopy command. This is designed to look at an
entire subdirectory of files and folders and copy all of them
with one single command line. Let's run the xcopy
command with a /?, and you'll see that all
of these different options are available for
the xcopy command. The one that we're going
to use is the /s option, which copies a directory and
subdirectory except any that may be empty. Let's clear the screen. And we'll use the xcopy command. I'll choose /s to copy
the subdirectories. I'll choose that I want to
copy my Documents folder. And this Documents
folder has a number of different
subdirectories within it. And then I want to choose to
copy that to my e:usb drive under a folder that already
exists called backups. And when I press Enter,
the xcopy command will find every
file that happens to exist under that
Documents directory and copy them all to my E drive. If you're looking for a
better version of xcopy, you may find it in the robust
copy or robocopy command. This is a file copy
utility that has a number of unique features,
including the ability to resume a file transfer if
it happens to be interrupted anywhere in the middle. This can be especially
good for wide area network or non-terrestrial
links, where you may have intermittent connectivity. On the surface, the robocopy
command looks and acts very similar to xcopy,
and much of the syntax is the same between the two. Let's use the robocopy
command to copy that same Documents folder to
that same backup folder that's on my USB drive. We'll use robocopy. I'm going to specify the /s
command to copy a subdirectory. I'm going to choose
my Documents folder. And then I'm going to
specify e: backslash backups and hit Enter. Robocopy will find
all of the files that are under that Documents
folder and copy all of them to my USB drive. After the copy is complete,
you can see the results of the copy command. And you'll see
exactly how long it took to perform the copy
and the type of throughput you were able to see
during that copy process.
