Command-Line Reference

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8

Use this topic to find the documentation resources and other technical information that you need to learn about the command shell, and to automate command-line tasks by using scripts or scripting tools.

To read introductory information about the command shell and command-line tools, see Feature description. To see a listing of new and deprecated command-line tools see New and deprecated functionality.

To find information about a specific command, in the following A-Z menu, click the letter that the command starts with, and then click the command name.

Prerequisites

The information that is contained in this overview applies to:

Windows Server 2012

WindowsВ ServerВ 2008В R2

WindowsВ ServerВ 2008

WindowsВ ServerВ 2003В R2

WindowsВ ServerВ 2003

Feature description

New and deprecated functionality

New or Deprecated?

Create a new cluster or configure an existing cluster.

Configure DFS folders and folder targets in a DFS namespace.

Creates and manages File Server Resource Manager quotas.

Create and manage file groups, file screens, file screen exceptions, and file screen templates that are used to configure general administrative options for screening files.

Enable optional features in Windows by downloading required files from WindowsВ Update or a source that Group Policy specifies.

Read, write, run, debug, and test Windows PowerShell scripts and modules in a friendly, graphic-assisted environment.

Install or remove roles, role services, and features.

Monitor an RD Session Host session.

Create and manage storage reports and storage report tasks, and configure general administrative options for File Server Resource Manager.

Command shell overview

The command shell is a software program that provides direct communication between the user and the operating system. The non-graphical, command shell user interface provides the environment in which you run character-based applications and utilities. The command shell executes programs and displays their output on the screen by using individual characters similar to the MS-DOS command interpreter, Command.com. The command shell in the Windows Server operating system uses the command interpreter, Cmd.exe. Cmd.exe loads applications, directs the flow of information between applications, and translates user input into a form that the operating system understands.

You can use the command shell to create and edit scripts to automate routine tasks. For example, you can create simple scripts in batch (.bat) files to automate the management of user accounts or nightly backups. You can also use the command-line version of Windows Script Host to run more sophisticated scripts in the command shell. For more information, see Cscript or Wscript. You can perform operations more efficiently by using scripts than you can by using the user interface. Scripts accept all commands that are available at the command line.

Customize the Command Prompt window

You can change the properties for the Command Prompt window.

To configure the Command Prompt window

Open a Command Prompt window, click the upper-left corner of the Command Prompt window, and then click Properties. (Or to open Command Prompt Properties from the keyboard, press ALT+SPACEBAR+P.)

Click the Options tab.

In Command History, type or select 999 in Buffer Size, and then type or select 5 in Number of Buffers. By increasing the screen buffer size to 999, you enable scrolling through the Command Prompt window. By increasing the number of buffers to five, you increase the number of lines in the Command Prompt window to 5000.

In Edit Options, select the Quick Edit Mode and Insert Mode check boxes.

Click the Layout tab.

In Screen Buffer Size, type or select 2500 in Height.

To further customize your Command Prompt window settings, perform any of the following optional tasks:

In Screen Buffer Size, increase Width.

In Window Size, increase Height.

In Window Size, increase Width.

Clear the Let system position window check box, and then, in Window Position, change the values in Left and Top.

In the Apply Properties dialog box, click Save properties for future windows with same title.

To enable or disable file and directory name completion on a computer or user logon session, run Regedit.exe and set the following REG_DWORD value : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\CompletionChar\REG_DWORD To set the REG_DWORD value, use the hexadecimal value of a control character for a particular function (for example, 0Г—9 is Tab and 0Г—08 is Backspace). User-specified settings take precedence over computer settings, and command-line options take precedence over registry settings.

Incorrectly editing the registry may severely damage your system. Before making changes to the registry, you should back up any valued data on the computer.

Command-line reference A-Z

To find information about a specific command, in the following A-Z menu, click the letter that the command starts with, and then click the command name.

Each command-line tool topic displays the version of Windows that is supported by the command-line tool.

Windows commands

All supported versions of Windows (server and client) have a set of Win32 console commands built in.

This set of documentation describes the Windows Commands you can use to automate tasks by using scripts or scripting tools.

Prerequisites

The information that is contained in this topic applies to:

• Windows Server 2019
• Windows Server (Semi-Annual Channel)
• Windows Server 2016
• Windows Server 2012 R2
• Windows Server 2012
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Windows Server 2008
• Windows 10
• Windows 8.1

Command shell overview

The Command shell was the first shell built into Windows to automate routine tasks, like user account management or nightly backups, with batch (.bat) files. With Windows Script Host you could run more sophisticated scripts in the Command shell. For more information, see cscript or wscript. You can perform operations more efficiently by using scripts than you can by using the user interface. Scripts accept all Commands that are available at the command line.

Windows has two command shells: The Command shell and PowerShell. Each shell is a software program that provides direct communication between you and the operating system or application, providing an environment to automate IT operations.

PowerShell was designed to extend the capabilities of the Command shell to run PowerShell commands called cmdlets. Cmdlets are similar to Windows Commands but provide a more extensible scripting language. You can run Windows Commands and PowerShell cmdlets in Powershell, but the Command shell can only run Windows Commands and not PowerShell cmdlets.

For the most robust, up-to-date Windows automation, we recommend using PowerShell instead of Windows Commands or Windows Script Host for Windows automation.

You can also download and install PowerShell Core, the open source version of PowerShell.

Incorrectly editing the registry may severely damage your system. Before making the following changes to the registry, you should back up any valued data on the computer.

To enable or disable file and directory name completion in the Command shell on a computer or user logon session, run regedit.exe and set the following reg_DWOrd value:

To set the reg_DWOrd value, use the hexadecimal value of a control character for a particular function (for example, 0 9 is Tab and 0 08 is Backspace). User-specified settings take precedence over computer settings, and command-line options take precedence over registry settings.

Command-line reference A-Z

To find information about a specific command, in the following A-Z menu, click the letter that the command starts with, and then click the command name.

Check whether a file/folder exists, with cmd command-line (NOT batch script)

I am on the windows console trying to find out whether a file/folder exists or not.

EXIST could be used in batch, but it is not available on the command-line:

5 Answers 5

The solution when the resource is a file it is pretty straight-forward as indicated by others:

Unfortunately, the above does not work for directories. The EXIST function returns the same result for both missing and present folders. Fortunately, there is an obscure workaround:

It turns out that to support constructs like appending >NUL on command statements, there is a sort of virtual file named «NUL» in every directory. Checking for its existence is equivalent to a check for the directory’s existence.

This behavior is documented in a Microsoft knowledge base article ( https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/65994 ) and I have confirmed its behavior on FreeDOS 1.1 and in a Windows 7 command shell.

EXTRA: The KB article indicates this technique can also be used to see if a drive is present. In the case of checking for drive existence, however, caveats exist:

An Abort, Retry, Fail? error occurs if the drive is not formatted.

Using this technique to check for drive existence depends on device driver implementation and may not always work.

Windows Terminal Tips and Tricks

October 15th, 2020

Windows Terminal comes with a lot of features that allow you to customize it and interact with it in a way that feels most comfortable to you. Let’s run through some tips and tricks that could help you set up your terminal in a way that’s perfect for you. At the time of this blog post, Windows Terminal is on version 1.3 and Windows Terminal Preview is on version 1.4.

On first launch

When you first install Windows Terminal, you will be greeted with a Windows PowerShell prompt. Windows Terminal ships with Windows PowerShell, Command Prompt, and Azure Cloud Shell profiles by default.

In addition to these profiles, if you have any Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) distributions installed, the terminal will automatically create profiles for those distros as well. If you would like to install additional WSL distros on your machine, you can do so after installing terminal and on your next terminal launch, the profiles for those distros should automatically appear. These profiles will have Tux as their icon, however you can change the icon of the distro in your settings to match whichever distro you have. You can find more information about WSL on the WSL docs site.

👉 Note: You will have to download the distro icons as they do not come shipped inside the terminal.

Customization

Windows Terminal comes with a large set of default settings, including color schemes and keyboard shortcuts. If you’d like to view the default settings file, you can hold Alt and click on the Settings button inside the dropdown menu.

Global profile settings

Windows Terminal provides you the option of applying a setting to every profile without having to duplicate the setting for each profile entry. This can be done by adding a setting inside the «defaults» array inside the «profiles» object. A list of all possible profile settings can be found on the Profile settings page on our docs site.

Custom color schemes

Windows Terminal comes with an assortment of color schemes by default. However, there are unlimited possibilities when it comes to color schemes. A great place to find additional terminal schemes is terminalsplash.com.

If you’d like to create your own color scheme, terminal.sexy is a great tool for creating and visualizing your own color schemes.

💡 Tip: You can match your custom color scheme to a background image by using the PowerToys color picker to grab hex codes for colors to use inside your scheme. PowerToys can be installed using winget with winget install powertoys .

Custom command line

You can give your command line some style with Oh my Posh and Terminal-Icons. These tools allow you to customize what your prompt looks like with colors, glyphs, and emojis. To get Oh my Posh with Posh-Git and PSReadline up and running, you can follow this tutorial.

Oh my Posh recently came out with Oh my Posh 3, which has a lot more customization options and is not only exclusive to PowerShell. After going through the tutorial linked above, you can upgrade to V3 with the following command:

You can add a bit more flair to your shell by adding custom icons with Terminal-Icons. The image below is also using a custom Posh theme to add emojis to the prompt line.

👉 Note: You will need to set your font to a Nerd Font in order to get the Terminal Icons to appear.

Old school fonts

For those of you who are fans of the retro terminal effect, a great place to find old school fonts is at https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/.

Places for background images

Desktop wallpapers often look great inside Windows Terminal as background images. Some great places to find background images are Windows Themes as well as WallpaperHub. Windows Terminal supports both images and gifs for background images.

Another popular option is placing the logo of the shell you are using as the background image, to help identify which shell you are in. You can set where the background image is placed with «backgroundImageAlignment» in your settings. More information on background image settings can be found on our docs site.

Functionality

wt.exe command line arguments

You can launch your terminal in a specific configuration by using the wt.exe command. Some options you can set are tab and pane arrangements as well as their starting directories and profiles. You can save a custom command as a shortcut and pin it to your taskbar to open your desired configuration.

If you use the wt.exe command inside the command palette, it will take effect in your current terminal window, rather than spinning up a new terminal instance.

This example will open the PowerShell profile in the current working directory in a new tab with a vertical pane running your default profile.

wt -p «PowerShell» -d . ; split-pane -V

Full documentation about wt command line arguments can be found on our docs site.

Panes

Windows Terminal has pane support for profiles. You can open a new pane of a profile by either holding Alt and clicking on the profile in the dropdown, or by using the following keyboard shortcuts:

Automatic pane split of current profile

Horizontal pane split of default profile

Alt + Shift + Minus

Vertical pane split of default profile

Alt + Shift + Plus

You can also move focus around your panes by holding Alt and using the arrow keys. Lastly, you can resize your panes by holding Alt + Shift and using the arrow keys. You can find more information about panes on our docs site.

Copy and paste

In Windows Terminal, the default keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste are Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V , respectively. If you do not have a selection, Ctrl + C will act as normal as the break command.

You can customize which keys you’d like to copy and paste with by editing the «copy» and «paste» key bindings. If you delete these key bindings from your settings.json, the terminal will default to Ctrl + Shift + C and Ctrl + Shift + V . This can be especially helpful for WSL users who need Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V free to use for their shells.

You can also choose which formatting is copied to your clipboard along with newline characters with the «copyFormatting» and «singleLine» actions associated with the copy command. Full documentation on clipboard integration commands can be found on our docs site.

Defining key bindings and actions

A large portion of the customizable properties inside Windows Terminal come from key bindings and actions. Commands inside the «actions» array will automatically be added to your command palette. If you’d like to also use them with key bindings, you can add «keys» to them to invoke them with the keyboard. A full list of every possible command can be found on the Actions page of our docs site.

Send input commands

Windows Terminal gives you the ability to send input to your shell with a key binding. This can be done with the following structure inside your «actions» array.

Sending input to the shell with a keyboard shortcut can be useful for commands you run often. One example would be clearing your screen:

Navigating to the parent directory with a key binding may also be helpful.

You can also use this functionality to run builds or test scripts.

WSL starting directory

As of now, Windows Terminal defaults to setting WSL profiles’ starting directory as the Windows user profile folder. To set your WSL profile to start in the

folder, you can add the following line to your profile settings, replacing DISTRONAME and USERNAME with the appropriate fields.

Cheers

We hope you learned a few tips and tricks about Windows Terminal throughout this blog post. We are currently planning another release for the month of November, so keep your eyes peeled for that one! If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to Kayla (@cinnamon_msft) on Twitter. For more information about Windows Terminal, you can check out our docs site.

Kayla Cinnamon

Program Manager, Windows Terminal, Console, Command Line, & Cascadia Code