Tiposaurus

This tip will show you how to write the output of a command at the Windows command line to a file. It's not hard (infact it's one of the very basics of command line programming).

Start Command Line within Windows by choosing Start->Run then entering 'cmd' and pressing enter.

Suppose you want to capture the output from a directory listing, say c:blah. To get the directory listing to display on the screen you would type the command dir c:blah which may generate the output:

C:\>dir c:\blah

Volume in drive C is Windows
Volume Serial Number is XXXX-YYYY

Directory of c:\blah

07/01/2006 21:08 <DIR> .
07/01/2006 21:08 <DIR> ..
07/01/2006 21:07 <DIR> folder1
07/01/2006 21:07 <DIR> folder2
06/03/2005 11:58 5,442,634 music.mp3
07/01/2006 21:07 17 text1.txt
2 File(s) 5,442,651 bytes
4 Dir(s) 12,453,460,480 bytes free

If you want to capture this listing to the file c:folder.txt then you would append > c:\folder.txt to the original command, ie:
C:\>dir c:\blah > c:\folder.txt

Notice now that nothing appears on the command line window after this and it simply moves on to the next prompt. If we now check the file c:\folder.txt then we see that it has the contents of the directory.

A slight variant of this is to use the greater than symbol, >, twice, ie:

C:\>dir c:\blah >> c:\folder.txt

This will append the output of the dir command to what is already contained in the file c:\folder.txt.

To view all the currently running processes in windows from the command line (choose Run then type "cmd"), you can use the command 'tasklist'. The output will look something like this:
C:>tasklist

Image Name               PID Session Name     Session#    Mem Usage
===================== ====== ================ ======== ============
System Idle Process        0 Console                 0         16 K
System                     4 Console                 0         52 K
smss.exe                 592 Console                 0        108 K
csrss.exe                648 Console                 0      5,868 K
winlogon.exe             680 Console                 0      2,632 K
services.exe             724 Console                 0      2,376 K
(...)

To terminate a process from the command line of windows, use the taskkill command:
When you know the name of the program to stop:
taskkill /IM notepad.exe
Or when you know the process ID, eg 784:
taskkill /PID 784
For more usage variants, type taskkill /?

Some of this information about what processes are running can be obtained by the tasklist command, e.g. this tells you the Process ID (PID).