Internal and external commands

There are two kinds of commands that can be run from the command prompt. There are the internal commands that are built into the command interpreter like “del” and “dir”. These commands can only be run from a command prompt (or by invoking the command interpreter in some other way). They are listed in the table below. There is also a large list of external commands that use an additional executable file that can be run from either the command prompt or the Start-Run line. Details of the various commands are available in several places. In the Professional version of Windows XP there is a help file ntcmds.chm, which has details of all the commands and their many switches. The help file can be opened by entering (without the quotes) "hh ntcmds.chm" into Start-Run. It may or may not be in the Home Edition, depending on what setup you have. However, in both versions a list of many (but not all) of the commands available can be obtained by entering "help" (without quotes) into a command prompt. For more detail on a specific command, enter "help command-name" or "command-name /?" For example to get information on the command xcopy, enter "help xcopy" or "xcopy /?”. Microsoft keeps moving things, but the last time I checked they had a command line reference at this link.