Command Line Cheatsheet

CmdCheatSheet.md

↩cheatsheet list

Command Line tips and tricks

• For Mac/Linux commands check my other Gist
• I list DOS commands below but it is highly recommended to use the last version of Powershell (version 6+) instead. It began the default command line tool in Windows and provides a wider range of options. Some commands are not supported in Powershell directly. You can use them with cmd /c. For example to use assoc type cmd /c assoc.
• for learning Powershell you can check this article

contents:

1. My favourites
2. Basics
3. Advanced
4. Editors
5. Environment

1) My favourites

• List line from a text source (history) contains a keyword (git):
  Get-History | sls -Pattern "git" env | grep AWS

2) Basics

command	description
sl ~	go to home directory C:\Users\User>
cd /	go to root directory C:\>
help dir	print help documentation of any command
cd, dir	moving, viewing - while dir is the classical DOS command, in Powershell we can use other Get-ChildItem aliases, like gci or the Mac/Linux-like ls. For hidden files use -Force flag. Likewise the classic cd can be used in Powershell as it is a default alias for Set-Location, just like sl
mkdir xfolder, New-Item info.log, ni info.log, del *.log, rm *.log	create an xfolder folder, create info.log file, delete all the files with .log ending (similarly del abc* deletes files having the prefix abc... )
explorer .	open a Windows explorer with the currect location
mv /home/jack/testfile /home/jack/testfile2	move testfile from its lication to the new location as testfile2
assoc, ftype	list file associations with programs and their locations (for example: .jpg to IrfanvView)
systeminfo	list computer name, manufacturer, OS version and install date etc.
ipconfig	list computer ip
arp -a	list network elements' IP, physical address and if they are static or dynamic
gci env:*, gci env:JAVA_HOME, SET	list environmental variables or print a specific one. SET is the original DOS command but it has a different functionality in Powershell
Get-History, F8	terminal command history (terminal-window related so don't trust it too much)
grep	search text. It can be used in terminal like grep text in filename see examples here but it is also very common to pipe an output to it. For example: history | grep code extracts all the commands from terminal history where we opened a file with VS Code
pipe |	read from standard output and pass it as a parameter to some function
cat index.html	read file to standard output (practically: print to console)
sls "findthistext" index.html	find the given test in the file with Select-String alias sls
tail -100 index.html	read last 100 lines of a file to standard output
wc index.html	count characters, words and lines in a specific file
date	print date
tree	print folder tree

3) Advanced

• find your running server and stop it You can do it by listing the running processes on your computer. If you have a running server (like Node.js or Tomcat) on a port (like 8080, 3000 etc.), you will see in the list that your server is there, like 0.0.0.0:8080. Copy the identifier of that process and stop it like below!

  Command Line: netstat -aon | find /i "listening"
  Powershell: netstat -aon | Select-String -Pattern "listening"
taskkill /F /PID 11224

command	description
driverquery -v	list drivers with details
tracert, ping, pathping	ping an IP or URL to tests its availability
tasklist	list running tasks

4) Editors

5) Environment

For handling environmental variables in Windows command line (CMD), [check out this StackOverflow article.]