This really good series of tutorials, shows us all how powerful the Command Prompt can be. Want to be the ultimate hacker? You should definitely learn your way with the Command Prompt.

An Ode to the Command Prompt – the Most Powerful and Least Used Windows Tool

Think you are a command line Guru in Windows XP? Well, test yourself and see how many commands you actually know! Can you create a Windows shortcut from the command line? Or add a new environment variable? Check out this list of all command prompt commands.

Windows XP Command Line

Tired of your applications locking up, and having to open up task manager and kill them? You can make a quick-kill shortcut that will just whack any application that isn’t responding. Make a new shortcut with this path:

taskkill.exe /f /fi "status eq not responding"

Tired of the old white font on black background of the command prompt? Right-click the title bar, choose Properties, and set the colors, fonts and width on the Colors tab

Did you realize that the DNS cache on your computer is tracking everything you do, even if you use Google Chrome’s "Private Browsing" mode? Simply use this command line to view everything in the cache:

ipconfig /displaydns

Then use this one to flush it:

ipconfig /flushdns

Ever wish you could just do simple calculations from the terminal? All you need to do is add the following to your bashrc file (or run it from the terminal to test):

calc(){ awk "BEGIN{ print $* }" ;}

When you’re using it, just make sure to not add any spaces, or enclose the calculation parameters in quotes, like this:

calc "8 * 99 / 4"

command line calculator

Have you ever just wanted a list of words that start with a set of characters? If you’ve got a Linux box handy, you can use the "look" command to do just that. Simply type with the following syntax:

look <letters>

And it’ll show any words that start with those characters. Or you could just use Google.

Ever wanted to convert a PNG file into an icon so you can use it somewhere in Windows? There’s a tiny, simple command-line application (for Windows or Linux) that can be used to convert them easily. Easy, that is, if you don’t mind a little typing. But you’re a geek, right?

png2ico – PNG to icon converter (Linux, Unix, GNU, Windows)

Some of us are command line junkies… it may not make sense, but we prefer to do everything from the shell if possible. We even know that ack is better than grep or how to kill Windows with just 3 keystrokes, after all.

Today’s fun tool is called Tofu, and it’s a dirt simple To-Do list manager implemented as a simple Perl script, meaning it will probably work for people using Windows (although you wouldn’t get colors). 

Tofu: plain (stupid) text-based todo(s) manager

If you are still a fan of old-school batch files, or you want to start up a command line application but don’t want to see the window, you might want to take a look at the simple Hidden Start, or HStart utility, which lets you easily do just that.

Hidden Start – run apps in the background – NTWind Software