Hello, I'm Brian Ferrill, and welcome to PACE
I T's session on command line tools for the
operating system part one. Today, we're going
to talk about what command line tools are
and then we're going to discuss some operating
system command line utilities that you can use.
With that, let's go ahead and begin this session.
We're going to start with command line tools
and what they are. Command line tools can
be a utility or a set of utilities that are
accessed from the command line interpreter,
the CLI. Usually, it is accessed from the
desktop, but not always. When you do have
the command line up, you can use forward slash,
question mark (/?) to find out what modifiers
can be used with which commands.
When you want to access the command line from
Windows Vista or Windows 7, you left click
on the start button and then, in the run box,
you type in "command" or "cmd." That will
get you access to the command line. On Windows
XP, you left click on the start button and
then you click on the Run and then you can
type in "cmd" or "command" into the run box
to get access to the command line.
Now, let's talk about some operating system
command line utilities that you can use.
We're going to start with directories. The first
command lines that you should know are md, rd, and cd.
Now, md stands for make directory
and it can create a directory in a given location.
Now, rd stands for remove directory. It deletes
a directory if the directory is empty, which
means it has no files or folders in it. Now,
cd is how you can change directories.
It's the navigational command.
Let's move on to del. Del stands for delete.
That erases things' del can delete
files and folders, but not directories.
Then there's format. This prepares a hard disk
to receive data and installs a file structure
as in FAT32, NTFS, or GPT. Caution: if you
use the format command, it will delete the
file structure table, which makes recovering
previous data rather interesting.
Let's move on to some copy commands. Of course,
we begin with copy. It's used to copy a source
file or directory to a named destination.
Now, copy didn't have quite the utility that
Microsoft was looking for, so they came up
with xcopy. It's a more robust utility than copy.
It can be used to make an exact duplicate
of a source. You can use it to duplicate a
program onto a CD or flash drive. Then, Microsoft
came up with robocopy, which stands for robust
file copy, and it shipped with Windows Vista
and newer. It is the functional replacement
to xcopy. It is, again, more robust.
Let's move on to taking care of the hard drive.
The first command we're going to talk about
is diskpart stands for disk partitioning.
It's a manual method of partitioning a disk.
It's an advanced tool that can manipulate
disk space from the command prompt even when
the Disk Management graphic user interface
is not available. Let's talk about chkdsk,
check disk. This checks the integrity of the
designated disk. It can help recover files
in some cases of corruption. A companion command
to check disk, is sfc. That stands for system
file checker. It's used to check the integrity
of system files on a disk. It can help in
cases of a system's file corruption that have
been caused by a virus infection.
Let's move on to some other commands and let's
talk about tasklist. It displays a list of
all tasks and services that are running on a machine.
It also displays memory usage and
the process identifier, the pid.
You should run tasklist before you run taskkill. This
is used to end one or more tasks or processes.
It can kill the task using the pid or the
image name. Then, we have shutdown. shutdown
is a manual method of forcing a shutdown,
restart, or log off from the command prompt.
That concludes this session on the command
line for the operating system part one.
We talked about what command line tools are and
then we discussed some operating systems'
command line utilities. On behalf of PACE
I T, thank you for watching this session and
I'm sure we'll do some more.
