The FOSS supports always boast about their powerful command line, which according to them is the feature windows lacks. The Linux geeks know certain tips and shortcuts to make their command line experience more easy and interesting, while most of the Windows users doesn’t even know that Windows too has got such tips. Just check out some of these tips which will certainly make you love your command prompt.

1. Drag and drop the files for getting the path

You will find it really boring to type the long file paths in the command prompt. No need for that extra work dude, just drag and drop the file in to the command prompt and you will get the full path and file name there in the command prompt.

1. Copy and Paste in command line.

If you want to copy something from the command prompt, click on the icon in the title bar and select Mark from Edit. Now just drag over the area you want to copy and press enter. Your text is copied to the clipboard. To paste the content you can click on the icon in the title bar and choose paste to paste the content you have in your clipboard. The similar actions can be performed by right- clicking inside the command prompt too.

1. F7 for command line history

You can retrieve the commands you typed in the command prompt by hitting the F7 key. You will get a list of commands listed by number. You can either use the arrow keys to highlight the command you want to use again or simply press the corresponding number of the command.

1. Function keys for history

Press F1 for pasting the previous command character wise, F2 followed by a number will paste the previous command up to the specified number of characters, and pressing F3 will paste the entire command.

1. Multiple Commands

You can give multiple commands separated by &&, the thing to notice is that the commands will not execute simultaneously, instead the one to left will be completed first and the right one after that. If the left command fails the command on the right will not work.

1. Full Screen

Alt+Enter will switch the command prompt to full screen. But this won’t work in Vista, where you need some additional tinkering.

1. Changing Window Size

Use the mode command to alter the window size. The syntax is mode <number of characters wide>,<no of lines high>. For example mode 75,50 will give you a window with 75 characters wide and 50 lines of height.

1. To Get Help

When you need some help about any command just type command /? Or command –help for getting help on that command. You can use the help command for getting the list of available commands, but this command is not as efficient as man command in Linux.

1. Filtering the command output

If you don’t want to waste your time in scanning the entire output and interested in only some specific output you can customize your command line output by filtering g the unwanted output. You can pass the output over to the command find. For eg you can use tasklist | find “application name” to list the entries in the output, only for the application name specified.

1. Sleep for some time

You may be wondered to see the sleep command missing In the windows command prompt. However you can make the ping to work as sleep. It can be done by typing ping -n 5 127.0.0.1 > NUL 2>&1, to wait for 5 seconds. But the thing to note is that the time wouldn’t be exact , so you can’t completely rely on that.

I am sure that these tips will make your command prompt experiences with Windows much interesting.