Capping off our series on helpful hacks, let’s get to know the Windows Command Line tool.
The Windows Command Line tool – also commonly known as the Command Prompt – is a lightweight OS tool called a shell that serves as a behind-the-scenes control panel for your computer. It’s a text-based interface where you can run built-in commands or execute scripts without the use of a graphical interface. To access it, simply type “cmd” into your Windows search bar and click on “Command Prompt”.
At first glance, the command line interface can be pretty intimidating. There are no dropdown menus or buttons like we’re used to with most Windows applications. Instead, what we’re greeted with is a bit of white text on a black background and a blinking cursor waiting for us to type something. But what do we type?
Well, help is a good starting point. If you type the word “help” and press enter, the command line will display a list of basic commands that it understands with short descriptions of what they do. To see more information about any command and how to use it, you can type the command immediately followed by a slash question (“/?”) with no space and then hit enter. That’s essentially all there is to it.
Luckily, it’s a lot more difficult to break your computer from the command line than it is when using the registry editor, but I still wouldn’t recommend just typing random commands without knowing what they do. Instead, here’s a precise list of commands you can use to do some pretty useful things:
Get a Concise Summary of Your System Details
There are many reasons why you might need to retrieve some technical specs for the computer you’re using. Maybe you need IT support and they need the details of your system, or perhaps you’re shopping for new computer hardware and compatibility with your current system is an issue. Whatever the reason, you can do exactly this from the command line by typing the following command and hitting enter:
systeminfo > c:\systeminfo.txt
This command retrieves the details of your computer’s name, model, and manufacturer, plus details about your operating system, processor, memory, and more, and saves all of it to a new file named “systeminfo.txt” in your computer’s top-level C: drive.
If it’s your computer’s network specs that you’re after, you can use this command instead:
ipconfig /all > c:\networkinfo.txt
This gets the details of your local connection such as domain and IP address and saves it to a new file named “networkinfo.txt” in your top-level C: drive.
Keep Your Applications Up-to-date
Keeping your computer and your programs updated with the latest updates and security patches is always recommended, but keeping track of which ones need updating isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Luckily, there’s a command for that:
winget upgrade
This handy command will check your computer for any application that’s out of date and display the name, current version number, and latest available version number. You can then perform updates right from the command line as well, either one at a time:
winget upgrade --name “Application Name”
or all at once:
winget upgrade --all
Create Your Own Custom Backups
If you want to preserve your important files without relying on bulky software like Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, you can use a command line trick to do this yourself:
robocopy “C:\SourceFolder” “D:\BackupFolder” /MIR /LOG:backuplog.txt
This command mirrors the files in your source folder into the backup folder on a separate drive and creates a log of the process in “backuplog.txt”. You can reuse the command any time you want to sync to your backup folder, or you can save the command as a batch script and have it run automatically using Windows Task Scheduler.