How to open Command Prompt from the Start Menu
On your Windows 10 PC, open the Start Menu and go to the Windows System shortcuts folder. There, you’re going to find a Command Prompt shortcut: click or tap on it to open CMD.
. How to open the Command Prompt from the old Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer
A somewhat cumbersome, but workable method to launch Command Prompt in Windows is to use one of Microsoft’s older web browsers to do it. Launch Internet Explorer or the old Microsoft Edge (not the one based on Chromium) and enter this command in the address bar: file://C:
. Ask Cortana to open Command Prompt
If you have a microphone installed on your Windows 10 computer or device, you can also tell Cortana what you want to do. Say “Hey Cortana” if you enabled her to answer you anytime you call for her, or click/tap on her icon next to the search field on your taskbar. Then, ask Cortana to “open Command Prompt.”
. How to open Command Prompt when you boot Windows 10 using the Advanced Startup Options
If you need to run advanced commands in Command Prompt and your Windows 10 PC no longer works properly, you might need a way to open CMD at boot, before Windows 10 loads itself completely. To do that, you can use the Recovery options. Here’s how:
Open the Settings app and navigate to Update & Security. Select Recovery on the left side of the window, and click or tap on Restart now in the Advanced startup section from the right.
On the Choose an option screen, press Troubleshoot.
Then, click or tap on Advanced options.
This brings you to the Advanced options screen. Here, you should get an entry called Command Prompt. Click or tap on it.
. How to open Command Prompt while installing Windows 10
We have another neat method of opening Command Prompt even when Windows 10 is not installed on your computer. It also works when your Windows 10 is corrupted that it can’t boot properly. Use a Windows 10 installation media to boot your computer or device.
It’s as simple as that! 🙂
Open Command Prompt using search
In Windows 10, one of the fastest ways to open Command Prompt is to use search. Inside the search field from your taskbar, enter command or cmd. Then, click or tap on the Command Prompt result.
How to open Command Prompt from the Run box
One of the quickest ways to open Command Prompt in Windows 10 is via the Run window. Press the Win R keys on your keyboard, then type cmd, and press Enter on your keyboard or click/tap OK.
Create a Command Prompt shortcut on your desktop or in any folder you want
If you prefer using shortcuts, then you should create a shortcut to the Command Prompt. This guide shows you how to do it: How to create shortcuts for apps, files, folders, and web pages in Windows. Basically, you have to right-click or press and hold on an empty space on your desktop or in any other folder, then go to New in the contextual menu, and click or tap on Shortcut.
Next, in the Create Shortcut wizard, point your new shortcut to cmd, give it a name (like Command Prompt, or Old-School Terminal :), and save it.
Pin Command Prompt to your taskbar or Start Menu
If you would rather have a clean desktop, you might prefer to pin the Command Prompt to the taskbar or to the Start Menu. To find and open Command Prompt in the Windows 10 Start Menu, click or tap Start, scroll down the list of apps, and open the Windows System folder.
Right-click or press and hold on the Command Prompt shortcut. In the menu that opens, you have options to Pin to Start for the Start Menu and More. When you choose More, the menu extends with the first option to “Pin to taskbar.”
Open Command Prompt using its cmd.exe executable file
You can also open Command Prompt using its cmd.exe file. Open File Explorer, navigate to the partition where Windows is installed, open the Windows folder, and then enter System32. There, you’re going to find cmd.exe – the executable file used by Command Prompt.
Best cmd commands used in hacking – guide for newbies
Like you all know command prompt is one of the most powerful tool in Window PC. You can do almost anything in your Window PC from this tool. Here we make a list of best Cmd Commands used in Hacking.
If you wanna be a hacker learn these commands carefully.
In case you don’t know some of them, then just type the command on CMD and hit enter. A little help will show up on your screen. Read it to understand what that particular command does.
Let’s start easy…
1. ping
This command will allow you to know if the host you pinging is alive, which means if it is up at the time of executing the “ping” command.
ping x.x.x.x (x is the IP address). You can try pinging 8.8.8.8 which belongs to Google
or
ping www.google.com (www.google.com is the website you want to ping, but you don’t know the IP)
2. nslookup
This command has many functionalities. One is for resolving DNS into IP. Lets say you know the website URL but you don’t know its IP but you want to find it out.
Eg. nslookup www.google.com (www.google.com is the website for which you want to find out the IP)
Now, another really nice function of nslookup is to find out IP of specific Mail Severs
nslookup (enter)
set type=mx (enter)
yahoo.com
This command will give you the mail server IP of yahoo.com. You can use whatever server you want and if it is listed on DNS, then you get the IP. Simple, isn’t it? You can send a spoofed email to your friends using the IP address of the mail server. You can check the tutorial here for sending spoofed email.
3. tracert
This command will give you the hops that a packet will travel to reach its final destination. This command is really helpful if you know the route a packet takes before it goes to the target box.
tracert x.x.x.x (x is the IP address)
or
tracert www.google.com (www.google.com is the website you don’t know the IP)
READ Follow These 10 YouTube Channels for Learning Ethical Hacking Course Online
4. arp
This command will show you the arp table. You can find out if anyone has done arp poisoning in your LAN using this command.
arp -a
5. route : This command will show you the routing table, gateway, interface and metric.
Code:
route print
6. ipconfig
This command will show you a lot of useful things like your IP, Gateway, DNS in use, etc. This command will give all that info but for all networks you might have it.
Code:
ipconfig
or
Code:
ipconfig /all
Also, in case you have a dynamic IP and want to change it, then type…
Code:
ipconfig /release (this will release your IP)
ipconfig /renew (this will renew your iP)
7. netstat
This command will show you connection stats
Code:
netstat
or
Code:
netstat -a (this will show you all the listening ports and connection with DNS names)
netstat -n (this will show you all the open connection with IP addresses)
netstat -an (this will combined both of the above)
net view x.x.x.x or computername (will list the available sharing folders on the target box)
8. netuser
This command reset Windows User Password without Knowing Old Password.
net user Prohacker *
Change Prohacker with your PC user name and press enter. Now type the new password.
Know more about this trick from below post.
Here are some additional CMD commands which will help you.
Code:
net use ipaddressipc$ “” /user:administrator
(this command will allow you to connect to the target as administrator)
Now if you want to connect to the target and browse the entire C drive, then use this command:
Code:
net use K: computernameC$
(this will create a virtual drive on your “my computer” folder)
Please not that this command will only work if the target PC/laptop has not set a Adminastrator Password.
And least but not last, the “help” command.
Quote:
whatevercommand /help
or
Quote:
whatevercommand /?
This command is very useful in finding what a particular command does, especially if you are a newby.
Hope you liked the CMD commands listed above. If you have found any command other than those listed above, kindly note them in the comments for our other readers.
Related Video:
Step 1: connect to a remote windows system from kali
Windows makes a distinction between commands that can be run while physically on the system and those that can be run remotely. We can’t assume that a command we can run while on the system will run remotely.
Here, we are only interested in those that can be run remotely. In my case, I will be connecting to the target system with a Netcat connection, but a Metasploit-spawned command shell or other will work just as well.
Step 2: basic commands
In many ways, Windows CMD commands are similar to Linux/Unix commands (Unix preceded these commands by over a decade, and Microsoft borrowed heavily from it). At its most basic, we need to change directories within the file system. Like Linux, Windows uses the cd (change directory) command. To travel to the root of the directory system, we can just type:
cd
In addition, we can move up one level in the directory structure by typing:
cd ..
If we want to see the contents of a directory, we type dir as seen above. Some other key and basic commands include:
del <filename>
This will delete the file, similar to the Linux rm.
type <filename>
This will display the contents of the file, similar to the Linux cat.
As you can see below, I used type to display the contents of the confidentialfile.txt. I then del (delete) the confidentialfile.txt, and when I return to display the contents of it again, I get the message that “The system cannot find the specified file.”
To create a new directory, we use the md (make directory) command (in Linux, it’s mkdir). To create a directory named “newdirectory,” we type:
md newdirectory
After making newdirectory, we can now run dir and see the new directory that we created.
Step 3: network commands
When we are on the remote system, we may need networking information. To do so, we have two basic commands, ipconfig and netstat. Ipconfig is very similar to the Linux ifconfig, as seen below.
To view the network connections of the system, we can type netstat, just like in Linux.
netstat
Step 4: view processes
Often, when we are on a remote system, we will need to see a listing of the running processes. From the GUI, of course, we can use the Task Manager (Ctrl Alt Del), but from the command prompt, we use tasklist.
tasklist
If we want to find a single process, we could use the filter findstr (find string). This works similarly to grep in Linux. So, to find the process named “explorer,” we could type:
tasklist | findstr explorer
Note, that we used the pipe (|), just like in Linux, to send the results from the tasklist command to the filtering command, findstr.
If I want to kill a process, I can use the taskkill command. It requires the PID of the process we want to kill. In this case, the explorer process has a PID of 1532, so to kill it, I can type:
taskkill /PID 1532 /F
Where the /F means to force the kill.
Conclusion
I am sure these tricks will make you a little more comfortable with the Windows Command Prompt. If you are one of our more tech savvy readers who has been relying on the Command Prompt for years, why not share some cool tricks that you’ve got up your sleeve? Chip in with your comments!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a__gZx_seyg
Last updated on 8 Feb, 2021
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