The Command Line Part 4 - Little Known or Used Commands

The Command Line Part 1

The Command Line Part 2

The Command Line Part 3

The Command Line Part 4

I have to stop soon before this article takes over my life ;)    There is so much you can do at the command line that  I just get carried away sometimes. I'm going to show you a few more not so popular commands that might peek your interest in the command line even more. Like I said, this is just a taste of what you can do with the command line.

Try out these commands.

tasklist - Displays all the current tasks running on your pc plus so much more. Type in the command tasklist /? to see al that you can do with this command.

Type in tasklist /svc  to get a listing of all your systems tasks, PID (process ID number) and associated processes.

Here's an abbreviated output from my machine.

If you wanted to kill one of the tasks, no problem. You can do that with the taskkill program. Comes in

handy for troubleshooting.

taskkill /?  output

Here's another command you can try. SystemInfo  The output is too long to list so I'll leave it up to you to try it. Basically it gathers up all the information about your pc and lists it for you. Handy command when you are looking at a friend's pc for the first time.

There's another command used by hackers all over the internet called the "net" command. Very powerful command. Now I am not going to show you how to hack anyone's machine because that's just not me. If you type in net /? and take a look at the listing you'll see various subcommands that are used in conjunction with the net command.

Here's just a small sample of its power. To change any user's password on a system you issue the following command:

net user (username) *      This command will prompt you for a new password.

So suffice it to say that this command, albeit very useful, can be used against you.

The last command I want to try and peek your interest in is netsh  Netsh is a command-line scripting utility that allows you to, either locally or remotely, display or modify the network

configuration of a computer that is currently running on the network. Another very powerful command.

Output of netsh /?

Just to give you an example of how to use this command, type in the following:

netsh diag ping adapter    This command will do a diagnostic ping of all the adapters in your system.

How to get to the command prompt when all the links have been taken away?

Open a notepad file

Type in the word “start” then hit enter

Save the file as a .bat file to your desktop, not .txt

Now just run the file

How to know the IP Address of a Site

Type: ping www.yahoo.com

IP Address will be listed in the output

How to get to some blocked sites

Ping the site you want to go to: ping www.yahoo.com

Note the IP Address

Now use that IP Address in your browser’s address line

Need privileges on a machine?

1>Create a new account

     Open cmd

     Netuser (new user name) (the password ) /add

2> net localgroup administrators (user name) /add

How to Change the Password on an account from cmd line Without knowing the old password

Net user (username) *

Type the new password twice

Done

Well I think that's about it for showing you just some of things that available to you through the command line. I'm sure you were surprised at a few of the commands. Not to mention we didn't even talk about batch files. We could take all this power and combine multiple commands in one file called a batch file and run these commands whenever we needed to, automatically. Maybe I'll cover batch files someday in another article. I really feel that knowing the DOS or XP Command Line really helps with a transition to Linux. Commands very similar to these are being used every day on Linux boxes.

Maybe the command line is making a comeback ;)     I don't really believe that, but it's nice to dream.