5 Useful Command Prompt Tricks You Might Not Know

When you have such an attractive interface, using Command Prompt might seem like a old fashioned thing. When you can easily navigate to a location or access different settings in your PC customize them, why go for complex commands and a dull interface? Well, it might not be as bad as one might think. Command Prompt might be a bit complex, but it makes all the manual tweaking just a single command’s work. The current users of Command Prompt understand how powerful it is, which is why they don’t mind learning few tricks or commands to take care of daily work in a snap. So learning at least basics of Command Prompt is worth saving few seconds of extra work everyday.

We have created this list of Command Prompt commands and tricks that may help you work better. Whether you just started using Command Prompt or you are a regular user, you should be able to find a trick to ease things up a bit.

Some Useful Command Prompt Tricks

1. Get help on almost every Command

This is especially helpful for beginners, but advanced users may get to learn few things too. You can easily get info on almost every command you provide in the Command Prompt. Information includes complete details of what a command does and what process are used, it may also show some examples.

To get the help, just type “/?” at the end of the command of which you need info. For example, you can type “ipconfig/?”, and you will get all the info.

2. Use Function Keys

You can use function keys (F1, F2, F3, etc.) right inside command prompt and get different results. Below are the uses of functions keys in Command Prompt:

F1: Pastes per character last used command

F2: Pastes last used command only to a specified command character

F3: Pastes Last used command

F4: Delete command only to a specified command character

F5: Pastes last used command without cycling

F6: Pastes ^Z

F7: Provides a list of already used commands (selectable)

F8: Pastes cycleable used commands

F9: Will let you paste command from the list of recently used commands

3. Save a Command to a File

If you want to save results of a command to a .txt for future reference, then it is quite easy as well. All you need to do is add “> (destination/file name with .txt extension)” at the end of the command you are about to execute.

For example, you can type “ipconfig > c:\Networkdetails.txt”, this command will create a .txt file in C drive with name “Networkdetails”.

4. Copy Data from the Command Prompt

Copying data from the Command Prompt isn’t just a Ctrl+C away, the process is actually different. It is not that hard, just right click anywhere in the window and click on “Mark” from the menu. After that, just select the text you want to copy and hit Enter to copy it.

Important Note: With Windows 10, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V commands to copy/paste has been enabled in Command Prompt. So you don’t need to follow the above process, if you are using Windows 10. Also, In Windows 10 keyboard shortcuts for CMD are enabled by default which wasn’t the case with earlier version of Windows.

5. Cycle Through Folders

Specifying exact directories can be a bit frustrating task if you don’t have the destination copied. However, if you just know in which drive or folder the required folder is located, then you can cycle through all the folders to reach it. To do this, just type specified drive and start press TAB key on your keyboard to cycle through all the folders inside it.