Whether you are a regular reader wanting to get to know your system better or someone who is getting into the tech field such as IT tech, software engineer, computer engineer or such, working you way around command line shows your proficiency with the computer, resulting you in demand in the line of proficient candidate.
Why should you use a Windows command line?
As a guy in the tech field, you will be required to know some of the fundamental commands like cd, dir/ls, md/mkdir, copy/cp, move/mv, del/rm/rmdir to advance commands. You might be thinking why command line when we can work our way around the GUI (Graphical User Interface) and just simply get our task done. You are right! Most of the time, you do not need to use a command line.
Yet, there are cases when command line is your only option to get access to your system. How would you deal with that? Another, there are lot of tasks that you can do that can be way faster than doing the same task in the GUI.
Assuming you already know the fundamental commands mentioned above, let’s get started with a little advanced ones. These following commands are something you want to remember. In order to remember, know that most of these commands are not hard to remember then again, practicing them will make them stick around over time.
Format
This command requires your proper experience and knowledge of working with hard drive partition and formatting. This is a very sensitive command, one wrong move and not knowing enough to use it, not even playing around, can cause you to lose your system and data of course.
Let me give you a quick peek at what format is. Formatting is basically a procedure of writing a new file system to a volume or partition of your hard drive. So that we can prepare the partition to hold the operating system or the data. There are built-in Windows utilities that you can use to format via GUI as well as many third-party software to help you, extensively, with formatting your hard drive.
For our purpose, we will work like the hacker way and do all of this via command line. Just get familiar with the command switches.
So, the command format itself is pretty self-explanatory and enables you to format a hard drive from the command line. You start with your drive where you want this to happen and run the command with the necessary switches to perform the specific operation you want.
A simple example would be C:\ Users\JohnBerlin > format f: /FS:NTFS /v:backup /c /q.
This will run the operation you will be guided from hereon the command line. Just to be on the safe side, since we need to practice these commands, and certainly this format command is something we do not want to toy around. In this case, just take a bite size chunk out of your storage and just play around with it. Make sure you do not have any important file there. This way you won’t run into the disaster and learn to get familiar with the command.
Remember the universal use of the wildcards like * and ?. With any command if you run /? , will show you all of the switches or option you can run along this command.
Hostname
This command gives you the name of the system. Running this command will tell you the name of the computer, known as a hostname. If you have a name for your computer, it will show you that name otherwise, default machine name.
Gpupdate
Windows has one of the most brilliant security feature which is Windows Group and User policies. If you have not yet got to dip your toes into it, you should make a go for it online or anyway feels good for you. This feature is one of the high priority feature you should be aware of specially in an organisation or company where many users have access to random computer system inside or outside.
To give you a brief on this, with groups and user policies, you are able to set authorisation over files and folders and their modification level and goes on into depth of security configuration you can make. This is highly crucial knowledge for the techs to keep under their belt.
Know that you can apply these group policies in a local standalone system or over a domain. If you have updated policies, setting this new configuration may take some time to update and spread over the domain. With the command like gpupdate, you are able to force the work station to update the new group policy right away.