The Essential Command Line

Besides the built-in commands that are part of the CMD shell (discussed in Chapter 11, “The CMD Command-Line Environment”), about 20 other command-line programs come in handy on a day-to-day basis. They fall into five categories:

• GUI shortcuts. Standard Windows programs that you can activate just by typing their name: calc, control, mmc, notepad, and regedit. The start command is also handy.

• General-purpose shell programs. Utilities to simplify life on the command line: findstr, more, tree, and xcopy.

• File-management tools. Programs that manage file permissions and access controls: attrib and cacls. (Cacls, by the way, is the only tool available that lets you manage file permissions on NTFS-formatted disks under Windows XP Home Edition without booting up in safe mode.)

• Management power tools. Programs that control Windows XP as well as its services and applications: driverquery, runas, sc, tasklist, and taskkill.

• Networking utilities. Tools for using and managing Windows Networking in general and TCP/IP networks in particular: ipconfig, net, netstat, nslookup, ping, and tracert.