Intro to DOS & AHK | All the Commands you need to know

Learn how to Use HELP and EXIT the command prompt

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/help

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/exit

Get a listing of files in a folder with the DIR (Directory) command

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/dir

Characters that can be used as placeholders (think of wild cards when playing poker) when you want to search for programs

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/desktop/indexsrv/ms-dos-and-windows-wildcard-characters

Navigating around your disk with the CD (Change Directory) command

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/cd

Clearing the command prompt with the CLS (Clear screen) command

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/cls

Begin working in the command prompt with CMD and START

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/cmd

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/start

Speed up your command line typing by leveraging the DOSKey to bring up history of what you've typed

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/doskey

Save a variable for future work with the SET command

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/set_1

Your system PATH is a very important variable to leverage and be aware of.   Here we show you how to display it and edit it.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/path

Sending your text to the screen is super easy with the ECHO command

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/echo

Redirecting your commands and output is a HUGE benefit!  Thankfully it is easy in DOS using PIPING

https://ss64.com/nt/syntax-redirection.html

Directing your output to the clipboard is both simple and super helpful.  Here we review CLIP

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/clip

Being able to read files from the command line is a critical tool to have access to. 
The TYPE command makes this a breeze!

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/type

When searching for text inside a file, FIND can really help you out

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/find

Sometimes you need to find patterns inside of files.  That's where FINDSTR comes in!

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/findstr

Learn how to Create and remove directories with MKDIR (MD) and RMDIR (RD)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/mkdir

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/rmdir

Removing directories that have files in them is a bit more complex.  We still use RMDIR (RD) but add a few extra parameters

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/rmdir

Here we show you how to copy files / folders with COPY and XCOPY  (XCOPY is the same as COPY but has many more options especially copying directories and subdirectories)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/copy

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/xcopy

You might be interested in ROBOCOPY https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/robocopy which has even MORE functionality

We start off reviewing COPYing files but Learn how to MOVE files on your hard drive

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/move

A really important point is to make sure you put your switches directly after your command!

Learn how to delete one or more files with the DEL (Delete) command

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/del

Sometimes you really need to see the structure of files / folders.  From the command prompt you can use TREE to see this (in simple cases).  Running this when you have a lot of files (say over 100) it may be a bit overwhelming.  Otherwise this can be helpful.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/tree

You can easily view and change File ATTRIButes with the ATTRIB command.

Displays, sets, or removes attributes assigned to files or directories. If used without parameters, attrib displays attributes of all files in the current directory.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/attrib

Use COMP and FC to Compare the contents of two files or sets of files byte-by-byte.  When this command compares files, it displays their location and file names. If used without parameters, comp prompts you to enter the files to compare.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/comp

FC will show you more specifics about the differences between the files.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/fc

Use REN / RENAME to rename files.  These can include wild cards

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/ren

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/rename

Sorting your output can be really helpful!  Here we show some simple examples and advanced sorting options.  Using SORT in conjunction with PIPE is really cool!   Being able to sort off a different column is amazing!

TASKLIST Displays a list of currently running processes on the local computer or on a remote computer

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/tasklist

TASKKILL can end one more more processes with the ID or image name.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/taskkill

Use PING to verify IP-level connectivity to another TCP/IP computer by sending Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo Request messages. 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/ping

In addition to working with your IP address you can also flush your DNS cache and force it to look it up

You can also release specific devices

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/ipconfig

The Net Shell is an entirely different command prompt with access to different commands.  The Network Shell command-line scripting utility that allows you to, either locally or remotely, display or modify the network configuration of a currently running computer. You can start this utility at the command prompt or in Windows PowerShell.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/netsh

Use CHKDSK to check and fix the file system and file system metadata of a volume for logical and physical error. 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/chkdsk

Learn how to run multiple dos commands all at once with BATCH files (files ending in .bat or .cmd)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batch_file

RECOVER recovers readable information from a bad or defective disk. This command reads a file, sector-by-sector, and recovers data from the good sectors. Data in bad sectors is lost. Because all data in bad sectors is lost when you recover a file, you should recover only one file at a time.

Bad sectors reported by the chkdsk command were marked as bad when your disk was prepared for operation. They pose no danger, and recover does not affect them.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/recover

A simple (free) tool we wrote to allow you to add an extension to your Windows Explorer context menu.  It will make it easy for you to run a command prompt at a folder you're in from the Windows Explorer shell

Please be very, very careful when you use this command!  You can easily end up wiping your disk's information!  Use with extreme caution!

DISKPART helps you manager your computer's drives (disks, partitions, volumes, etc.)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/diskpart

SHUTDOWN Enables you to shut down or restart your local and/or remote computers

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/shutdown

AutoHotkey is a free open-source language that is incredibly powerful.  If you'd rather not work from the DOS command prompt, you can use AutoHotkey to execute DOS commands from within the Windows environment.

Start off by downloading AutoHotkey from here: https://www.autohotkey.com/ 

We recommend you install the Unicode 32-bit version of AutoHotkey

AutoHotkey is a plain text language so, technically, you could read the files in Notepad.   Having said that, having a powerful editor can really help you with your coding so we highly recommend downloading SciTE4AutoHotkey.  You can get the file here: https://the-automator.com/SciTE