Windows Command Line Tutorial - 1 - Introduction to the Command Prompt

what is going on everyone welcome back to another tutorial series in this video series I'm going to be showing you guys how to use the Windows command line all the cool things that you can do with it all the different tools and tips and it's going to be awesome so well let's just go ahead and get started so first things first how the heck do you open the command line well what you can do is you can go to this Start menu down here and you can just type CMD in hit enter in boom roasted look at that or if you don't feel like moving your mouse what you can do is you can actually just hit the Windows key on your keyboard just like that you can type CMD hit enter and look at that you never even had to touch your mouse so anyways check this out this is the Windows command line help you how beautiful looking is this so before you get started learning how to use it how to move around and all the cool things that we can do let's talk about why we would ever want to use this I mean we already have this awesome graphical interface I mean that's kind of the point of Windows so we don't have to use this command line so why would we even bother with it well actually in a lot of cases depending on what you're trying to do the command line is actually faster than using the GUI and whenever I say GUI I mean graphical user interface pretty much are all of these cool icons and you know pictures dragging with the mouse so this is called a graphical user interface what you usually use and it's pretty much the opposite of this old you know outdated looking command line but like I said in a lot of cases it's faster than using the GUI and also there are certain tools and software that are only available to the command line so for example I'm going to be showing you guys a program called teach arc later on and you can only run it from the command line you can't use it you know in a GUI type of way so that's pretty cool and a lot of like security and networking tools are also only available from the command line and yeah in another cool thing the last thing I want to say is later on I'm going to show you guys how to build your own programs and scripts for the command line so enough for me rambling let's go get started so the first thing you're going to notice is whenever you pop this open you have a little indicator and this is called the current working directory it's basically where you are on your computer so let me open up just this old Windows Explorer and I'll show you guys the equivalent of it so right now it says I'm in see users Bucky so my main hard drive in a directory called users and the user I am is Bucky so this is where I'm at right now now if you're just using this Windows Explorer in order to move around to a new directory you just find one and double click it like this say I wanted to move in my desktop double click that easy stuff now if I ever want to go back I'll just click this back button or I can click up here however in our command line we don't have that luxury we don't have anything to click except this big black background so how would we move into the desktop well any time you want to change your directories you type the keyword CD that means change directory so from here remember we can just go desktop and hit enter and that means I want to change or go into my desktop and look at that so now we are basically in the desktop so now we can run whatever tools and you know make files from here make directories whatever we want to do now you're thinking ah right well how do we get back because in Windows Explorer you can either click this right here or has a big old back button with the command line we don't have that back button so any time you want to go back or up a directory what you do is you're a CD and instead of back or anything like that you write dot dot this means take me to the parent directory so if you see my path is see users Bucky desktop so it's pretty much going to bump us back into Bucky right there pretty cool now you know how I said that anytime you want to change a directory you pretty much write CD and then the name where you want to move in - well you're not only limited to move one step at a time you can actually move multiple steps so you see like in this Windows Explorer if you want to get to a file or folder inside my desktop you click desktop and then I don't know maybe you want to go into videos two clicks so from here we can actually do is this type desktop and then backslash and then videos so hit enter and boom look lad so we already see that whenever you use this it only takes one step typing in one path rather than two clicks so that's pretty cool and now if you guys are like alright well what if I want to go back two steps so I want to go back in the desktop and then back into Buckey what what you do is CD dot this is going to take you up one however if you do forward slash dot again this means take me back to directories so look at that so that's the basics of how to navigate around and I'll show you guys something else that's pretty cool so if we are just in Bucky right now you see that we have um let's say that we want to go to downloads so what we can do is we can actually type CD and then we can start typing the word downloads but see I'm lazy and I don't feel like typing in the entire word because it's going to take half a second and I got stuff to do so instead what you can do is you can actually hit tab on your keyboard now what hitting tab does is it pretty much tries to autocomplete it so since I take D it said okay you want to change to a directory but I have two of them that start with D desktop in downloads so I'm going to hit tab and it's going to fill in whatever it thinks I'm at first it just looks at alphabetical order the first directory that starts with D now if it doesn't get the right one then I can hit tab again and boom look at that so pretty much use tab whenever you want to autocomplete and if there's only one gah let me do this see the desktop with OCD videos so I only have one directory that starts with v on my desktop so it's just going to give me videos by default but again use tab to autocomplete and save you some time and it doesn't only save you time but it also helps with typos since you know you might actually accidentally spell videos like that I mean you probably wouldn't but it's pretty much saves you time and helps with typos so there you go so that is your real quick introduction to the Windows command line I'm sure you guys are thrilled already you know if you're like alright so I can move directories wow this thing is useless well wait to like 5 tutorials from now you guys are going to see just how awesome it is so thank guys for watching and I will see you guys next time

Channel: thenewboston

Views: 1,925,795

Keywords: windows, 10, command, line, prompt, tutorial, basics, tricks, networking, change, directory, cheat, sheet, codes, tools, troubleshooting

Id: MBBWVgE0ewk

Length: 7min 30sec (450 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2016