Windows was built so that you would never have to touch a command line. But, some things are needed for command line: some old tools, for instance, or some things that don't need a GUI. Running the random perl script, debugging blender, and for now, running F#1 all have their uses for the command line. It's also a totally different way of thinking about your computer that will come in handy if you ever have to administrate a server that doesn't have a gui.
Now, find and run you command line (prompt) interface under Start->Accessories. Now, you should be faced with a black box that contains:
p>blah blah blahC:\Documents and Settings\Bob>
With your cursor sitting right after the > character. Now, let's type in the
dir
p>>dirscreen barf
And we get alot of screen barf. It'll tell you everthing that is in that particular directory, or folder, if you were going through the windows gui, and a little more information. It's useful for figuring out where to go next, which the next carries out. The command, cd, will c_hange d_irectories:
p>>cd Desktop>dirscreen barf
And we get screen barf that corelates to what is on the desktop at the moment. Now, to get back to where we were, try cd .., or change diretory to '..', and issue a dir command. You should notice that we are back to where we were. So, what does the cd . command do?
Now, let's go back to the Desktop, and issue the following command:
p>>notepad example.txt
And notepad should open, and should ask you if you want to make a new file. Say yes, type a few words of wisdom, and save the file. Now, issuing dir again, we should have a new file, called example.txt. Let's multiply your words of wisdom with cp:
p>>cp example.txt example2.txt
Horray! We have words of wisdom for everyone now! But there are too many words of wisdom now: we need to put away some of the words. Let's mkdir!
p>>mkdir foo
Now, doing dir again, we should have a new directory. Let's finally move one copy into the directory with move:
p>>move example2.txt foo\
Dir again, and example2 should be gone. You can check if it made it into foo\, but now we tire of our words of wisdom. Let us destroy the work of our hands with del!
p>>del example.txt
A quick dir should reveal that our wisdom is no more. Now, let us destroy the *gasp* directory with rmdir!
p>>rmdir foo
It is no more.
Before we go on, we'll want to tell you about tab completion. In a fresh shell(cmd.exe window), do 'cd d' and then tab once. If you don't have anything weird installed, like me, cmd should automagically complete the 'd' to 'Desktop'. What joy! It'll save some typing.
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/04/useful-windows-xp-dos-commands-tricks.html