What's Command Prompt used for?..?

Question

My step dad just asked to see my laptop and typed in something long in the Command Prompt and some stuff came up and I was just wondering what could he have done or seen?

My step dad builds/works on computers, he knows everything about them pretty much.

Answer 1

Once upon a time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and we old folks were using PC's with DOS 5 and Windows 3.0, much computing was done from a command prompt and mere mortals could even write their own BASIC programs. If you needed GUI's to compute, you bought an Apple. Even the Apple I needed for you to type in commands for it to work. Your clicks are just a quick way to run a long and thankfully hidden command.

Answer 2

Hi. "Command Prompt" is a way to type commands in DOS without going through the normal GUI, or Graphic User Interface which you normally use. Sounds like your step dad has some DOS experience. If you want to try it, click on Start> Run> and enter 'cmd' or 'command' into the box. A window will open up with the old C:\ prompt. Type "dir /w /p" and you will see a directory of file names in columns (/w means 'wide') and in pages if there are many files (/p means 'page'.)

Answer 3

Hello Amanda J,

Back in the bad old days of computers, before they came out with icons and menu commands, people did all of their computer activity from a terminal or Command Line Interface. You need to know what the DOS, Unix, or other various computer platform computer commands are to operate your computer.

The problem with using a prompt is that you need to be smarter than the computer. It is not near as intuitive, but it does offer a certain amount of programming power that you don't have with the GUI method.

--Rick

Answer 4

It's a secondary interface, since GUIs are hard to program utility and troubleshooting programs usually use command line as a starting point.