educate me

Hi, If someone gets time, could you please tell this newbie what the scary little black window is in xp. I think it is called the 'command prompt' or command line?:confused Is it something one can learn on their own? Any help with where to learn more about the computer on a level just up from the basics; a book name, ect, much appreciated. sheena

 

Yeah its just the command line. basically just about anything you can do in the command prompt youre already doing on the graphical interface. thats all an OS used to be before the graphical interface became popular. there are some "advanced" commands that will tell you some more stuff in command prompt than what you can easily find in the graphical interface. no real reason to use it for basic stuff. you can find commands by a google search for windows command prompt commands.

its also what batch scripting is based off of kind of. a batch file is just a linear list of commands you can use individually in command prompt...

 

This link should make for some interesting reading, as it details all the commands available at the command prompt. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490890.aspx.

 

MS-DOS overview



Before the windows program was designed there was only MS-DOS, No mouse, no pull down menus with pre-designed tools to manipulate data. No Microsoft anything, there was in my time Lotus 123, Word Perfect, and Dbase III. I strongly suggest to you to stay clear as this is the space behind which windows operates and this can only lead to trouble for a "newbie" (as you called yourself) to your continuous and harmonious relationship with your computer...


MS-DOS the acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, is an operating system with a command-line interface used on personal computers. As with other operating systems such as OS/2, it translates keyboard input by the user into operations the computer can perform, it also oversees operations such as disk input and output, video support, keyboard control, and many internal functions related to program execution and file maintenance.

 

Thanks for the replies. In xp's help section it tells you some things you can do at the 'command prompt' to fix things if you can't fix them thru normal channels. As well, there is something called I think, 'dr.martin' you can use to fix things. Thought that would be useful. Anyway, before I was able to read the replies, I got a book on xp and 'more xp' and also 'pc for dummies' to get me started. I know about 'not disturbing the deep' and I don't want to, but I admit I have wanted to get to how the whole thing works and the secret of how everything comes together from the time I got the computer. It seems computers are only taught in bits and pieces, like math. I want an overview that will allow me to deduce from it, like one can do in English, and many other subjects. So that, piercing the mystery, is my main motivation.
sheena

 

bits and bytes, actually...

bleh, bad joke lol

 

Funny. Good quote.
sheena

 

command prompt, this dates back from the old 'DOS' times, do you guys remember that time?, the only thing we had was a command prompt to do everything. Wow , I am just getting old.