Command Prompt Tricks and Hacks

by Sahil bhat

The Windows Command Prompt tool, and many of its commands, might seem boring and time consuming at first glance, but as anyone who has ever used the Command Prompt very often can tell you, there's much to love than to hate!

I guarantee that these several Command Prompt tricks and other Command Prompt hacks will get you excited about many of the mundane sounding Command Prompt commands like telnet, tree, or robocopy... okay, robocopy sounds pretty cool and interesting.

Some of these Command Prompt tricks and hacks are special features or fun uses for the Command Prompt itself, while others are just neat or relatively unknown things you can do with certain CMD commands.

Let's get started! Open Command Prompt and then browse through these 21 super-cool Command Prompt hacks.

Whatever you do, don't miss the crazy trick where you can watch the entire Star Wars Episode IV movie, for free, from right inside the Command Prompt. Yes, I'm serious.

01. Use Ctrl-C to Abort a Command

Any command can be stopped in its tracks with the abort command: Ctrl-C.

If you haven't actually executed a command, you can just backspace and erase what you've typed, but if you've already executed it then you can do a Ctrl-C to stop it.

Ctrl-C is not a complete command as it can't undo things that aren't undoable, like a partially complete format command.

However, for things like the dir command that seem to go on forever or questions you're asked at the prompt that you don't know the answer to, the abort command is an excellent Command Prompt trick to know.

02. View a Command's Results One Page (or Line) at a Time

Have you ever run a command, like the dir command, that produces so much information on the screen that it's almost useless? Well You're not alone.

One way around this is to execute the command in a special way so whatever information is generated is shown to you one page, or one line, at a time.

To do this, just type the command, the dir command for example, and then follow it with the pipe character and then the more command.

For example

While executing dir /s | more  the Cmd will generate thousands of lines of results that you expect from the dir command, but the more command will pause each page of results with  -- More -- at the bottom of the page, indicating that the command is not done running.

Just press the spacebar to advance by page or press the Enter key to advance one line at a time.

03. Run Command Prompt as an Administrator Automatically

Many commands require that you execute them from an elevated Command Prompt in Windows - in other words, execute them from a Command Prompt that's run as an administrator.

You can always right-click on any Command Prompt shortcut and choose Run as administrator , but creating a shortcut to do the same thing can be a huge time saver if you're a frequent Command Prompt power user.

To complete this Command Prompt trick, just create a Command Prompt shortcut on the desktop, enter the shortcut's properties and then select the Run as administratorbox located in the Advanced button on the Shortcut tab.

04. Hack the Prompt Text

Did you know that the prompt itself in the Command Prompt is completely customizable thanks to the prompt command? It is, and when I say customizable, I mean really customizable.

Instead of C:\>, you can set the prompt to any text you want, have it include the time, the current drive, the Windows version number (like in this example image), you name it.

One useful example is prompt $m$p$g, which will show the full path of a mapped drive in the prompt, alongside the drive letter. 

You can always execute prompt alone, without options, to return it to its sometimes boring default.

05. Become a Command Prompt Power User With Function Keys

The fact that the function keys actually do something in the Command Prompt is maybe one of the best kept secrets about this tool :

F1: Pastes the last executed command (character by character)
F2: Pastes the last executed command (up to the entered character)
F3: Pastes the last executed command
F4: Deletes current prompt text up to the entered character

F5: Pastes recently executed commands (does not cycle)

F6: Pastes ^Z to the prompt
F7: Displays a selectable list of previously executed commands
F8: Pastes recently executed commands (cycles)
F9: Asks for the number of the command from the F7 list to paste

Another Command Prompt trick coming up soon is full of arrow key shortcuts, a few of which are similar to these function key tricks.

06. Save a Command's Output to a File

An incredibly useful Command Prompt trick is the use of redirection operators, specifically the > and >> operators.

These little characters let you redirect the output of a command to a text file, giving you a saved version of whatever data the command produced in the Command Prompt window.

For example, let's say you're about to post a computer problem to an online forum and you want to provide really accurate information about your computer. An easy way to do that would be to use the systeminfo command with a redirection operator.

For example, you might execute systeminfo > c:\mycomputerinfo.txt to save the information provided by the systeminfo command to that file. You could then attach the file to your forum post.

See How to Redirect Command Output to a File for more examples and a better explanation of how to use redirection operators.

                               Peace