Acquisitions Editor: Agatha Kim

Development Editor: Jennifer Leland

Technical Editor: Russ Mullen

Production Editor: Liz Britten, Eric Charbonneau

Copy Editor: Cheryl Hauser

Editorial Manager: Pete Gaughan

Production Manager: Tim Tate

Vice President and Executive Group Publisher: Richard Swadley

Vice President and Publisher: Neil Edde

Book Designer: Maureen Forys, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Compositor: JoAnn Kolonick, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Proofreader: Jen Larsen, Word One

Indexer: Ted Laux

Project Coordinator, Cover: Lynsey Stanford

Cover Designer: Ryan Sneed

Cover Image: iStockphoto

Copyright © 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-0-470-65046-2

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department,
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030
(201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008
or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: The publisher and the author make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation warranties of fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales or promotional materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for every situation. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional services. If professional assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. The fact that an organization or Web site is referred to in this work as a citation and/or a potential source of further information does not mean that the author or the publisher endorses the information the organization or Web site may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that Internet Web sites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read.

For general information on our other products and services or to obtain technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at (877) 762-2974, outside the U.S. at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mueller, John, 1958-
Windows command line administration instant reference / John Paul Mueller.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-65046-2 (pbk.), ISBN: 978-0-470-93107-3 (ebk),
ISBN: 978-0-470-93090-8 (ebk), ISBN: 978-0-470-93086-1 (ebk)

1. Command languages (Computer science)—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Microsoft Windows (Computer file)—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 3. Operating systems (Computers)—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title. QA76.7.M79 2010 005.4’46—dc22 2010032265

TRADEMARKS: Wiley, the Wiley logo, and the Sybex logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates, in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dear Reader,

Thank you for choosing Windows Command Line Administration Instant Reference. This book is part of a family of premium-quality Sybex books, all of which are written by outstanding authors who combine practical experience with a gift for teaching.

Sybex was founded in 1976. More than 30 years later, we’re still committed to producing consistently exceptional books. With each of our titles, we’re working hard to set a new standard for the industry. From the paper we print on, to the authors we work with, our goal is to bring you the best books available.

I hope you see all that reflected in these pages. I’d be very interested to hear your comments and get your feedback on how we’re doing. Feel free to let me know what you think about this or any other Sybex book by sending me an email at nedde@wiley.com. If you think you’ve found a technical error in this book, please visit http://sybex.custhelp.com. Customer feedback is critical to our efforts at Sybex.

Best regards,

Neil Edde Vice President and Publisher Sybex, an Imprint of Wiley

This book is dedicated to Claudia Meyer, who has taught me a great deal about human spirit and the ability to come back after a crisis. She has been an inspiration to me.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my wife, Rebecca, for working with me to get this book completed. I really don’t know what I would have done without her help in researching and compiling some of the information that appears in this book. She also did a fine job of proofreading my rough draft and page proofing the result. Rebecca also keeps the house running while I’m buried in work.

Russ Mullen deserves thanks for his technical edit of this book. He greatly added to the accuracy and depth of the material you see here. Russ is always providing me with great URLs for new products and ideas. However, it’s the testing Russ does that helps most. He’s the sanity check for my work. Russ also has different computer equipment from mine, so he’s able to point out flaws that I might not otherwise notice.

Matt Wagner, my agent, deserves credit for helping me get the contract in the first place and taking care of all the details that most authors don’t really consider. I always appreciate his assistance. It’s good to know that someone wants to help.

A number of people read all or part of this book to help me refine the approach, test the coding examples, and generally provide input that all readers wish they could have. These unpaid volunteers helped in ways too numerous to mention here. I especially appreciate the efforts of Eva Beattie, Jonathan S. Weissman, and Osvaldo Téllez Almirall who provided general input, read the entire book, and selflessly devoted themselves to this project.

Finally, I would like to thank Pete Gaughan, Agatha Kim, Jennifer Leland, Liz Britten, Cheryl Hauser, and the rest of the editorial and production staff at Sybex for their assistance in bringing this book to print. It’s always nice to work with such a great group of professionals and I very much appreciate the friendship we’ve built over the few years.

About the Author

John Mueller is a freelance author and technical editor. He has writing in his blood, having produced 86 books and over 300 articles to date. The topics range from networking to artificial intelligence and from database management to heads-down programming. Some of his current books include a Windows command line reference, books on VBA and Visio 2007, a C# design and development manual, and an IronPython programmer’s guide. His technical editing skills have helped over 52 authors refine the content of their manuscripts. John has provided technical editing services to both Data Based Advisor and Coast Compute magazines. He’s also contributed articles to magazines like DevSource, InformIT, SQL Server Professional, Visual C++ Developer, Hard Core Visual Basic, asp.netPRO, Software Test and Performance, and Visual Basic Developer. Be sure to read John’s blog at

http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/id/AQOA2QP4X1YWP

When John isn’t working at the computer, you can find him in his workshop. He’s an avid woodworker and candle maker. On any given afternoon, you can find him working at a lathe or putting the finishing touches on a bookcase. He also likes making glycerin soap and candles, which comes in handy for gift baskets. You can reach John on the Internet at JMueller@mwt.net. John is also setting up a Web site at http://www.mwt.net/~jmueller/. Feel free to look and make suggestions on how he can improve it. One of his current projects is creating book FAQ sheets that should help you find the book information you need much faster.

Introduction

Let’s face it, while GUI applications are nice and they do provide significant levels of hand holding, they’re cumbersome and inefficient. The command line is an essential part of the administrator experience—at least, if the administrator wants to go home at night and spend weekends somewhere other than work. Using the command line can often provide faster results with far less effort. In addition, the command line lends itself to easy automation, so you might not need to manually perform some tasks at all; you can let the computer do them while you have a cup of coffee and gab with a friend in the next cubicle. However, no one can memorize every command, or even a significant subset of them, so Windows Command-Line Administration Instant Reference provides you with a quick reference for the common commands and provides examples of their use to help you avoid potential errors. In short, if you want to spend time doing something other than adding users to the server, you need this book!

Work Faster and More Efficiently

Have you looked at the Administrative Tools folder of the Control Panel lately? It typically contains fourteen or more links to consoles that you use to administer Windows using a GUI. Finding the right console isn’t always straightforward. For example, most people would be tempted to look for hardware settings in System Configuration, but they really appear in Computer Management. Some of the consoles don’t even appear in the Administrative Tools folder. A typical Windows setup includes 21 consoles, so one-third of the consoles are missing—you need to know they exist in order to use them. If you want to set a group policy, you need to know that you have to use GPEdit.MSC (the Group Policy Editor) to change them, but don’t count on Windows helping you. In short, the GUI is disorganized and difficult to use. On the other hand, if you want to use the command line, you open one item—the command prompt. How much simpler can things get?

Speaking of group policies, it requires a single command at the command line to change any group policy. Yes, changing the policy requires that you create the command, but there is help to do that. Changing a policy such as a Domain Profile for Windows Firewall using Group Policy Editor, however, requires that you dig down six levels, figure out which of the policies will actually do what you want, and then perform upward of five additional steps in order to change the policy. Now, imagine that you have to change a lot of policies on a number of machines. When working with the command line, you can create a batch file that performs the task on every machine on your network. The batch file will likely require an hour or so to create and test, while using the GUI may very well require days because the Group Policy Editor lacks automation.

The command line is great for more than just changing settings. Have you ever wanted to discover all of the files associated with a particular application and been frustrated in your efforts? The command line supports a nifty utility called FindStr that lets you look inside files for copyright statements and other strings. If you have some idea of what to look for, FindStr will faithfully search every file on the hard drive for that string—no matter where the file might appear. You can’t even perform this task using the GUI because Microsoft thinks it knows better than you how to find things. The GUI doesn’t even index the inside of every file, just those that Microsoft thinks you should search. In short, if you want to find anything anywhere, you need the command line, not a GUI.

It would be easy to go on and on about the benefits of the command line, but you have an entire book to convince you of the incredible value of using the command line in place of the GUI in most situations. Of course, every good thing comes with caveats and the command line is no different. The command line does require that you be able to type commands accurately in order to obtain accurate results. That’s why you need Windows Command-Line Administration Instant Reference. This book uses a task-based approach to make it easy for you to type just the command you need. It’s packed with hundreds of example commands, some of which will meet your needs with little or no change. If you want to get more out of your day, you need to use the command line with Windows Command-Line Administration Instant Reference.

Goals for Writing This Book

I want you to be able to get started using the command line today to perform useful work. Starting with the first chapter you’ll find that you can immediately begin using the command line to work faster and more efficiently. Suddenly, the system that felt so slow just a few minutes earlier will accomplish work quickly because you’ll take command using a time proven interface. The first and most important goal of this book is to get you to work now.

Most people don’t realize the immense number of commands and utilities available at the command line. In fact, there are commands and utilities to perform some extremely esoteric tasks and you won’t see them covered in this book. Instead, this book exposes you to the commands and utilities that you’ll commonly use; 149 of them. That’s right! You have access to 149 commands and utilities that can make it faster and more efficient to administer the systems under your control. Some of these commands and utilities, such as Windows Management Interface Command line (WMIC) are so powerful that you might decide never to use the GUI again. The second goal for this book is to expose you to the most useful commands and utilities that the command line has to offer. Look at Appendices A and B to see lists of these commands and utilities.

Automation is one of the major benefits of working at the command line. If you need to perform a particular task often, there isn’t any reason to keep doing it manually when you can tell the computer to perform the task for you instead. Using a GUI makes many people think that it’s normal to manually perform the same repetitious work over and over again until your eyes glaze over and you fall asleep out of sheer boredom. Work shouldn’t be boring and the automation that the command line can provide relieves you of boredom. Many administrators have the mistaken idea that they have to become programmers to use automation, but this book shows you that you can create perfectly acceptable batch files to automate tasks without becoming even close to a programmer. So the third major goal of this book is to help you understand how automation comes into play using batch files.

Of course, you may find that batch files are limited and after working with batch files for a while, you might decide that a little programming isn’t so bad after all. The fourth goal of this book is to demonstrate that scripting is not only powerful, but that it isn’t very hard either. Imagine how nice it would be to get all of your work done in half or even a quarter of the time you do now. Working at the command line and using the full scope of automation it can provide will help you move toward that goal. So, the final goal for this book is to help you understand the benefits of scripting. You won’t actually learn how to script using this book—that’s the topic of another tome, but you’ll get enough information to decide whether scripting is right for you. In addition, you’ll see some pretty nifty scripts that will definitely save you time.

Who Should Read This Book?

This book is designed to meet the needs of administrators who are tired of letting the GUI slow them down and who want the productivity advantage of working at the command line. More and more administrators are moving to the command line because it lets them perform tasks quickly. In addition, the command line lends itself to automation, so that you don’t spend hours performing precisely the same boring task over and over again.

Power users will also appreciate this book because it gives them the edge needed to work quickly in today’s competitive market. There isn’t any reason to spend hours mousing about when you can complete the task in a matter of seconds at the command line. For that matter, by using some of the scheduling techniques found in this book, you can automate some tasks completely so that you won’t actually perform them manually again. This book is all about letting the computer do as much for you as it possibly can so you can spend more time watching the game, reading a book, or doing something else that’s a bit more interesting than sitting in front of the computer.

I’m assuming that you already know how to use Windows quite well and that you’ve performed administration tasks in the past. This book presents you with instructions for performing common tasks at the command line and the information you need to customize these tasks to meet your specific needs. However, the complete novice won’t be able to keep up with the pace of this book.

What You Need to Use This Book

You’ll very likely want to set up a test machine when working through the examples in this book. A production machine simply isn’t the right environment in which to learn how to work at the command line. I used Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 while writing this book. If you have some other version of Windows, you may find that your system doesn’t have some of the features I discuss. You’ll still find plenty to interest you.

I recommend that you set up the hardware required for a two-machine network as part of your test setup. Otherwise, you really won’t see how some of the client-side tasks are supposed to work. Using a virtual machine setup may work acceptably, but I opted for using two physical machines so that the interactions would work just as they do on your network. There are advantages to using two physical machines, because virtual machines sometimes lack the differences in environment that two physical machines provide.

The book contains descriptions of numerous utilities that you can download and use free for the most part. You may prefer other utilities, but I used these utilities to create the content for the book. If you find a technique useful, download the utility that goes with it and try it too. I’m always on the lookout for new utilities, so please be sure to tell me about your utilities at JMueller@mwt.net.

Conventions Used in This Book

It always helps to know what the special text means in a book. The following table provides a list of standard usage conventions. These conventions make it easier for you to understand what a particular text element means.

Table 1-1: Standard Usage Conventions

The book also uses a number of special text entries. These special entries provide you with additional information about the task at hand. The following list describes each of these special text entries.

Part I: Command Line Basics

In This Part

CHAPTER 1: Configuring the Local Machine

CHAPTER 2: Making Remote Connections

CHAPTER 3: Automating Tasks