Who is command prompt

To securely erase all traces like if you're going to recycle the drive or sell the PC , you'll want to right-click the drive in Windows Explorer, choose Format, and uncheck the Quick Format box. Or use a third-party tool like DBAN , which has a number of other secure-erase options. When you get a new laptop or do a clean reinstall of Windows, you're likely to forget some of the tools you use every day and take for granted. Before wiping your drive, you can grab a list of every program installed on your PC with one command.

Unlike the others on this list, however, this command must be run from PowerShell, a newer, more powerful tool built into Windows. Open the Start menu, search for PowerShell, and launch a new window. Then run the following command—it's long, but it's just one copy-and-paste command, which'll grab the contents of three different registry keys and output them to a text file on your desktop:.

Replace Whitson with the name of your user folder at the end of that command to get the file on your desktop. Note that this won't include Windows Store apps, though, which you can list by running:.

Again, replacing Whitson with the name of your user folder. There'll be a lot of junk in that list, but you can manually grab the few programs you want to remember and paste them into your original list, if it's easier. OK, this isn't exactly a "useful" trick, but it certainly is neat. If you enable Telnet in Windows search for "turn windows features on or off" in the Start menu, then check the Telnet box , you can run:.

Some of the data included in a Whois query is obvious: The registrant name, address, contact email, phone, and so on. But what about the rest? You might want to look up when a domain expires, what nameservers are handling the DNS hosting, or you might want to find who the hosting service is so you can lodge a complaint.

You may even like a domain name enough to contact the owner about purchasing the domain, though domain owners often charge a premium. If you change web or email hosting, you will want to query the Whois to find the name servers that will tell you where the domain is hosted. When you migrate your website and email to a new hosting service, you will need to update the name servers to point at your new hosting service then verify that the name server changes took effect.

As I sometimes have path problems, where one of my own cmd scripts is hidden shadowed by another program earlier on the path , I would like to be able to find the full path to a program on the Windows command line, given just its name. On UNIX, which command prints the full path of the given command to easily find and repair these shadowing problems. Windows Server and later i. It does not match built-in shell commands like cd.

Note that Windows PowerShell defines where as an alias for the Where-Object cmdlet , so if you want where. While later versions of Windows have a where command, you can also do this with Windows XP by using the environment variable modifiers, as follows:. You don't need any extra tools and it's not limited to PATH since you can substitute any environment variable in the path format, of course that you wish to use. It actually returns all possibilities but you can tweak it quite easily for specific search rules.

PowerShell commands are not just executable files. Get-Command is able to find and list all of these commands quite akin to Bash's type -a foo. This alone makes it better than where. As Get-Command also honours this env. See Get-Command for more options and examples. If you have PowerShell installed which I recommend , you can use the following command as a rough equivalent substitute programName for your executable's name :.

More is here: My Manwich! PowerShell Which. The GnuWin32 tools have which , along with a whole slew of other Unix tools. Cygwin is a solution. If you don't mind using a third-party solution, then Cygwin is the way to go. In PowerShell, it is gcm , which gives formatted information about other commands. If you want to retrieve only path to executable, use.

Been using it for years. NB: to install it explode the zip somewhere and add If you can find a free Pascal compiler, you can compile this. At least it works and shows the algorithm necessary. Not in stock Windows but it is provided by Services for Unix and there are several simple batch scripts floating around that accomplish the same thing such this this one. The best version of this I've found on Windows is Joseph Newcomer's "whereis" utility, which is available with source from his site.

None of the Win32 ports of Unix which that I could find on the Internet are satistactory, because they all have one or more of these shortcomings:. This batch file uses CMD variable handling to find the command that would be executed in the path. You can grab it from GitHub here. It uses a convenient Windows installer that installs about extremely useful open source UNIX applications compiled as native win32 binaries. It is designed to be as small as possible, about 10 MB, as opposed to Cygwin which can run well over MB depending upon options.

While my tool is primarly for searching of various dll versions it shows more info date, size, version but it do not use PATHEXT I hope to update my tool soon. Not quite a one-liner if you wrap the code in setlocal enableextensions and endlocal.

For you Windows XP users who have no where command built-in , I have written a "where like" command as a rubygem called whichr. EXE replacements that add significant functionality. Now I switched to the which that comes with Git. It is faster and also works as expected. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Select Command Prompt from the list.

Another way to open Command Prompt in Windows 10 is to look in its Start menu folder:. Select the Windows System folder from the list. Choose Command Prompt from the folder group. One more method in Windows 10 is through the Power User Menu.

In more recent versions of Windows 10, Command Prompt has been replaced by PowerShell, but you can still access it from the Power User Menu by editing the taskbar settings. Select the Start button and then swipe up to show the Apps screen. You can accomplish the same thing with a mouse by selecting the down arrow icon at the bottom of the screen. Prior to the Windows 8. If you're using a keyboard or mouse, a really quick way to open a Command Prompt window in Windows 8 is through the Power User Menu —just hold the WIN and X keys down together, or right-click the Start button, and choose Command Prompt.

Swipe or scroll to the right on the Apps screen to locate the Windows System section heading. Select Command Prompt. You can now execute whatever command you needed to run. See our List of Windows 8 Command Prompt Commands for a complete list of the commands available through Command Prompt in Windows 8, including short descriptions and links to more in-depth information if we have it. Open the Start menu from the bottom-left corner of the screen. In Windows 7 and Windows Vista, it's a bit faster to enter command in the search box at the bottom of the Start menu and then choose Command Prompt when it appears in the results.

Choose Command Prompt from the list of programs.