How's it going guys I'm Thio Joe and today we're gonna be taking a look at the good old command prompt in Win
And you may know this is a very useful tool but there are a lot of features that are pretty much unknown and dare
I say our secret features that make it even more useful now. This is going to be in Windows 10 particularly
That's what I'm using. But a lot of these are gonna carry over in previous versions as well
I've got about 15 of these. So let's get started
Probably says the path of the current folder. You're in like C
And then either the user directory or maybe system 32 if you're running as an administrator, you can actually customize
Any of that text to say whatever you want and you do this for example by typing in the prompt command
so you
prompt and then whatever text you want and now that will be the
Text that shows up before whatever command you type in so you can type in prompt
Hello, and now it will say hello. And then you type the commands after that obviously having just some random word
There is not really going to be very useful so you can actually use the command prompt and then space
/ ? to show
special codes that you can use to not just have words but also dynamic information there as well such as a
Timestamp or the version of Windows and stuff like that
So for example, maybe we don't want it to just show the file path. But we also want to have it as a timestamp
So if you're looking at a log later down the road, you know exactly when these commands are run
So to do this you can look at the special codes
and what we would want to type in is
Prompt to say we're gonna change this then we would use the command dollar sign T, which is the current timestamp
Code and then we're gonna do a space and then dollar sign B as a vertical line and we're just kind of formatting at this
Point another space and then we're gonna use the dollar sign P command
Which will show the current path just like it usually does and then we want to put that right arrow caret thing
So we're gonna use the dollar sign G command to show the greater sign so you can see after we do
that it now shows the
Timestamp and then the divider line and then the file path like it did before so a little bit more useful
also
If you ever mess it up and you want to go back you can simply revert to the default by typing and prompt and nothing
after that
And it will automatically go back so you could also use this as some sort of prank if you want to mess with your friends
You could have it's a catastrophic error or something like that
And then they won't know what's wrong with it
Might be kind of funny as long as you know how to put it back one thing to keep in mind though
is that when you use this command it will actually
reset
once you restart the command prompt if you wanted to have that by default and always show your
Customized one when you start command prompt you have to do a quick
Registry edit now. I'm gonna show you how to do that
but as usual
if you are not experienced with the registry editor at all be very careful and maybe even avoid this trick because
Messing with that registry and deleting something could literally ruin your entire version of Windows and you'll have to reinstall it
So just be very careful here. So what you do is you open up the registry editor and you need to find the key
That's under computer H
Hkey current user then software then Microsoft and then command
Processor now on the right side after you enter that little folder you're going to right-click
You're gonna create new and then string value and you want to name this
autorun and after you create that you're going to right click on that key that you just made the autorun one and
click modify and then where it says value data, you're gonna type in whatever command you want to auto run as
Command prompt starts up
so in this case
If we want the prompt command to always have a certain format that we customized like the one we just made
Oh, yeah
All we have to do is paste in that timestamp
Prompt code that we created before and now you can see when we start up command prompt it now
Automatically shows that customized prompt there and this doesn't just have to be the prompt command
You could have this as any command you want to run automatically when you start command prompt, so use it wisely
All right up next this is another kind of useful one
So instead of customizing the prompt maybe you want to customize
the title that shows up in the
title bar of the command prompt and to do that you just type in title and then whatever text you want and again this will
Reset after you close the command prompt
But if you want you can put it in that auto run command in the registry and it will change it permanently
Okay moving on
This is kind of - and you might know these already but first of all is the help command?
I'm sure you know about this one
you just type in help and then it will basically list a bunch of very common command prompt commands that you can choose from but
You can also access help by typing in any command and then typing space and then a slash
Question mark and I showed this in the previous
One we did and that will actually bring up a bunch of information
About that command and this doesn't necessarily have to be one of the commands that's built in to command prompt
For example, you could have one that's like SFC system file checker, and that's not gonna appear when you type in help
But you can still use the slash question mark command to show information about it such as the syntax some
Arguments or parameters in it that sort of thing. All right up next
We have a couple that we're gonna combine together and that is how you can access
Previous commands that you might have typed in and you want to either repeat these or to see what you typed in before
The first of which is simply using the arrow keys if you use the up and down arrow keys
It will scroll through previous commands you did and paste them
So you can just press ENTER again to do it again
You can also get a list of previous commands you typed in in that instance since you've started command prompt by typing in DOS key
Slash history and then will output a list of all the commands you've recently typed in and finally another good shortcut is simply pressing
f7 and this will actually bring up not only a list of
Previous commands but it'll also let you select them directly and then press ENTER and then it will paste it
So if you don't have to keep scrolling through using the arrow keys, you can just select it right there pretty useful
All right up next this is a useful one
If you want to have multiple commands executed
On the same line so you can do this by typing in two ampersands or + signs between the commands
So say we want to customize the tight and the prompt at the same time
you could type in prompt whatever text you want and then the to and signs and then
the title command and whatever you want when you hit enter it'll do both at the same time and you can also use this when
You're doing that registry Auto run command. If you want to have it execute multiple things
You can combine them with ampersand and it'll do it all at once. All right moving on
This is definitely a useful one which allows you to put the output of a command on to the clipboard
so if you know that you're gonna be copying the command or you already
Executed it and you want to go back and copy at this time?
You'd simply type in the command and then a space and then a vertical line and then another space and then type
clip after the command so it'll look like this and then now when you execute that command
It'll be copied to the clipboard and you can paste it on a forum if you're asking for help into a text document
Whatever you want related to this
the next one is that you can actually
Output an output to a file not just the clipboard and you do this by using the greater than sign which is the right arrow
And then a space and then the name of the file so test dot txt or whatever and then it will output that
To a text file which is located in your default library folder for that user
So see users Joe or whatever keep in mind if that file already exists
It will actually overwrite that file. But if you want to append the text results on to the file
so maybe you already have a
file dot txt and you want to add the results onto that you can use two greater than signs and it will simply append the
Results to the end of it for both of these commands if you want you can specify the file location
So it doesn't just go to the default one and that's simply by doing the greater than sign and then typing out the entire
File path and then it'll go to that file location. All right
This next one is a very simple shortcut and that is ctrl C now
Normally, if you're in Windows, this always does a copy command
But in command prompt it's special and it actually aborts the currently running program or command
So if you're running something it's taken too long or you didn't mean to run it and it's kind of frozen
You could press ctrl C and it should abort that command and then bring you the prompt again
So if control-c doesn't do a copy and paste, how do you do a copy and paste?
Well, that's the next tip and that is at least in Windows 10 and I think 8 as well
You actually highlight whatever you want in the command prompt and then to copy you actually
right-click
and then it'll
Unselect, but now that text will be on the clipboard and to paste you just do ctrl V again
Like normally would and it will paste it
alright
These next couple are definitely super useful and that is how you can easily
Open the command prompt to any path you want without having to type in the change directory command and then typing it all out
The first is when you're in any Explorer window to open the command prompt to that location
you can simply click in the
path at the top
So it'll show your location see whatever you can click on that and type
CMD and now will open automatically the command prompt to that location
Also, you may not know this
but if you have a command prompt window open
You can actually drag and drop any folder or file in the command prompt window and it will automatically paste
that file path
So if you want to quickly change the directory you could also type in CD
Space and then drag it in and it'll do that or if you want to execute a command
onto a certain folder you can type the command and then when you're ready to
Type in the path you drag it on and it'll do it for you
Now these vex few aren't really secrets, but they're very useful tools that you may still not have known about
The first of which is the system file checker and you use this command by typing
SFC and typically the one you want to do is SSC space slash scan now
And this will actually check all the windows files for anything that's corrupted
So this is very useful if windows is misbehaving or complains about file errors or corrupted files
This is usually the first thing you want to do and it will automatically repair anything that it finds now
This isn't a foolproof way of always fixing anything
But it's definitely something that's easy to try first
And if you want to know more commands with this you can again use that
slash question mark and it'll show you a bunch of other syntax commands and
If you want to check them out another useful one is the IP config command
So you type in ipconfig?
And it will bring up a bunch of information about all your network adapters and you can also type in ipconfig
Space slash all and it'll show you even more information though. That might not be useful to you now
This could be used for a few things if you just want to see
quickly, like the IP address the local IP address of a network adapter
It'll show you all the network adapters and all their IP addresses all in one place
So this is really useful and it'll also show you your internet IP address as well
And finally, this one's definitely not a secret
But I should point it out for those of you who don't know about it
And that is the ability to access a whole bunch of different properties and defaults to customize
The command prompt in general now to get to this there's two ways
you can either right click on the title bar and then go to defaults or
You can simply left-click on the little icon at the top left of the window and it'll bring up that same
Right-click menu. Now if you click defaults and properties, it'll bring up the same window
But I believe that if you do properties it won't continue if you open it next
So if you want to change some settings that will stay changed you have to go to the defaults menu
I believe and in this menu it'll show a few different tabs and a whole bunch of customization options such as
fonts sizes
colors of the window editing options the layout all
Sorts of stuff that I'm not going to get into but I'm sure you can mess with it
So hopefully those tips and tricks will be useful the next time you use the command prompt if you want
I've got some other videos on here that also have some cool tips and tricks on different stuff
You might not have known about so you can check those out and until next time be seeing you