We all are used to the “familiar and easy to use” graphical user interface of Microsoft Windows Operating System. How many of you guys know that it has a command line interface also which is quite powerful in doing things that cannot be achieved using graphical tools. This is a humble attempt to share some tips and tricks that can be performed
using command line of Windows XP. These commands would be useful if you want to automate tasks on your computer. For running any of these commands, you need to be in a command prompt or run it direclty from the start->run dialog box.

shutdown -s -f -t00 – Immediately start shutting down the computer. ! If you want to reboot, use shutdown -r -f -t00. Remember,this command tries to forcefully close all applications that may be running on your computer. So be sure that you saved the documents before you run this.

tree c:\foldername | more – This command will give you a nice overview of how files and folders are organised in folder “foldername”.

netstat – This command will give you a list of protocols running on your system, and what connections are to/from your computer and what services are they using etc etc. It is always good to know who all are connected to your computer when you are in a network, isn’t it?

net share – If you are sharing files and fodlers on your computer over the network, you might want to get a list of them… This command does it. Simple.

net use – This does the opposite of the above command. It shows you a list of shared resources that you are connected to. 🙂

xcopy /s/e/v/c/y c:\documents\*.* d:\backup – This command copies all files and folders in c:\documents into d:\backup. The special thing about this command is that it does not abort even if copying of one file fails. Very useful to recover possible data from scratchy CDs etc.

That’s all for now. Have a nice time !