Windows Vista in a Nutshell

The Command Line

Many people who are new to computers will never have heard of the command line, also known as the command prompt, and sometimes (but incorrectly) called the DOS prompt. (DOS was the operating system used by most PCs before Windows became ubiquitous. The command line in DOS was the only way to start programs and manage files, and the command prompt in Windows borrows many of the command names from DOS but with vastly improved capabilities.) Users of older PCs may remember the command line, but they may be under the impression that it’s purely a thing of the past. Advanced users, on the other hand—whether they remember the old days of the DOS command line or not—have probably learned the advantages of the command-line interface, even when using Windows Vista on a day-to-day basis.

You can perform many tasks faster by typing one or more commands into the Command Prompt window. In addition, some of the programs in Windows Vista are command-line-based tools, and you can run them from the command prompt as well as from the GUI. For full documentation on the command line and the Command Prompt application, see Chapter 14.

At the command prompt, you can get help on the available command-line options by typing:

commandname /?

You can see a list of all built-in command-line utilities by typing help and pressing Return.

Warning

When you run some command-line programs, such as openfiles, which displays all currently open files, you may get an error message similar to this: ERROR: ...