Windows cmd or cmd.exe is standard shell and command line interface for all of the Windows operating system. Currently Powershell is preferred one but cmd is useful and popular too. In this tutorial we will look some features of the cmd.exe aka cmd

Open Command Line Shell

We can open command shell or cmd in different ways. We can open it from Program Files. But the most practical way is opening with Run prompt. We will write cmd to the run and hit enter.

cmd

Run and Close Cmd

We can provide the command we want to run in cmd shell environment with /C option. We will also specify the command we want to run.

In this example we will run dir command and then close cmd

> cmd /C dir

If we want to see the close effect we can run this command in run

Run and Return Cmd

If we need to run command in a new cmd shell and then do not close the cmd in order to see command output we can run /K option.

> cmd /K dir

Run Program with Parameter

We generally need to provides parameters to the commands executed by cmd . We can provide these parameters after the command like below. In this example we will provide the file name to the command.

> cmd dir "c:\Users"

Turn Echo Off

Commands those creates output to the shell will print output the the cmd . We can turn these output off to make things more clear.

> cmd /Q dir