Displaying the Command Prompt Window

Microsoft Windows is a very visually oriented operating system. This makes it easy to use because you can use your mouse to "point and click" your way to the results you want. This ease of use sometimes comes at a price, however. There are times when you need to perform repetitive operations or batch several commands together. By using the Windows Command Prompt, you can perform a wide variety of commands much more quickly than you could with the mouse.

Figure 1. The Command Prompt window.

There are about 100 line-oriented commands that can be entered at the Window's Command Prompt. A few examples include: CD (change directory), COPY (copies files to another location), DEL (deletes files), DIR (provides a directory listing of a folder's contents), etc.
Displaying the Command Prompt window is quite simple. Just click the Start button, type CMD, and press Enter. A black window appears, often called a DOS box or DOS window. (See Figure 1.) This is the Command Prompt window.
You can now type line-oriented commands at the prompt ("C:\>") and terminate each one by pressing the Enter key. If you've never worked at the Command level before, one of the first commands you may want to type is the Help command: Just type the word Help and press Enter. You'll then see a list of the commands available to you.
To exit the Command Prompt window, either type the word Exit and press Enter, or simply click the window's Close button.

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