Windows 7 / Getting Started

Getting More Information

There's quite a bit of information about the command-line environment tucked away in Windows, but it's scattered far and wide. To read about the CMD program itself and the built-in commands, click Start, Help and Support and then search for the following strings:

  • cmd
  • command shell overview
  • command-line reference
  • command-line reference A-Z

On Windows 7 and Vista, nothing is likely to come up, but click the Search IT Pro Content on the Microsoft Technet website link and you are led to the content.

Microsoft has mostly eliminated Command Prompt information from the Help files distributed with Windows 7 and Vista. Steer toward the pages that describe the Server versions of Windows.

You can also get information from the command-line help program.Type commands of the form

help cmd
help dir
help for

and so on, using any of the command or program names listed in this tutorial. The help command automatically sends its output through more so you can view it a page at a time. Almost all command-line programs display help information if you run them with /? as a command-line argument, so if help doesn't work, try running the program like this:

cmd /? | more
more /? | more
ping /? | more
[Previous] [Contents]

In this tutorial:

  1. The CMD Command-Line
  2. CMD Versus COMMAND
  3. Running CMD
  4. Opening a Command Prompt Window with Administrator Privileges
  5. CMD Options
  6. Disabling Command Extensions
  7. Command-Line Processing
  8. Console Program Input and Output
  9. Using the Console Window
  10. I/O Redirection and Pipes
  11. Copy and Paste in Command Prompt Windows
  12. Command Editing and the History List
  13. Name Completion
  14. Enabling Directory Name Completion
  15. Multiple Commands on One Line
  16. Grouping Commands with Parentheses
  17. Arguments, Commas, and Quotes
  18. Escaping Special Characters
  19. Configuring the CMD Program
  20. The Search Path
  21. Changing the Path
  22. Predefined and Virtual Environment Variables
  23. Setting Default Environment Variables
  24. Built-in Commands
  25. Extended Commands
  26. Listing Files with the Dir Command
  27. Paginating Long Listings
  28. Printing Directory Listings
  29. Sorting Listings
  30. Locating Alternate File Streams
  31. Setting Variables with the Set Command
  32. Conditional Processing with the if Command
  33. Scanning for Files with the for Command
  34. Using the for Command's Variable
  35. Processing Directories
  36. Numerical for Loop
  37. Getting More Information