20 Cool Command Line Tricks for Windows and macOS

If you’re troubleshooting hardware problems or just want to know if something’s installed successfully, seeing a list of installed drivers can help. Type “driverquery” then Enter, and you get a list of all the current Windows drivers, alongside install dates and display names.

No, really. Type “telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl” then Enter to watch the entirety of Episode IV in ASCII. The same trick works on macOS, too. You do need to make sure Telnet is installed on Windows though: Search “turn Windows features on or off” from the taskbar.

Struggling to get an overview of all the nested folders on a drive? The command line can help. Type “tree” and hit Enter to see the current folder and its subfolders neatly laid out. Add “> c:\export.txt” to save the results in a text file that you can browse at your leisure.

Nobody wants their Windows system crashing and shutting down on a regular basis. If you’re having problems, then the “sfc /scannow” command, which launches the System File Checker tool, checks the most important OS files and fixes them, if possible.

Forgot your wifi password? Use the command “netsh wlan show profile SSID key=clear” and just replace “SSID” with the name of the wifi network. If you’re not sure about the networks you’re connected to, use the “netsh wlan show profile” command.

Shut down your computer in the future with “shutdown”—add “-t xxx” to delay it by xxx number of seconds (from 0 to 315,360,000, which is 10 years) and “-f” to force close any dialogs. As an example, to shut your computer down in 636 seconds, you type “shutdown -f -t 636".

The command prompt can give you a pretty detailed and technical readout of the battery health of your laptop (or tablet). Type “powercfg /batteryreport” and hit Enter to generate the report, then open C:\WINDOWS\system32\battery-report.html to view the findings.

Lost your Windows license key again? If it’s not printed on your computer case or on any documentation, then you can find it by typing “wmic path softwarelicensingservice get OA3xOriginalProductKey” into the command prompt window, then hitting Enter.

The command “ipconfig” shows your network connection status (the gateway is your router, if you need to know its IP), but you can also use “ipconfig /release” and then “ipconfig /renew” to reset your internet connection, which can solve multiple issues.

It’s not always easy to figure out where to find your computer’s specs—that is, it’s not easy unless you use the command line. Type “systeminfo” and press Enter to get a detailed readout of everything from the amount of RAM installed to when the last reboot was.

Screenshots you take on macOS are saved as PNG files by default, but you don’t have to settle for this. Type “defaults write com.apple.screencapture type JPG” and hit Enter to change the format to JPEG, for example. Other file formats you can use are PDF and TIFF.

macOS comes with a text-to-speech engine, and getting it running in Terminal is as simple as typing “say” followed by any text in quotation marks, then Enter. Admittedly this isn’t all that useful, but it’s still fun to play with... maybe for breaking the silences at work?

You can add a login screen message through Terminal, maybe with contact details in case your Mac gets lost. Use “sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText” and then a space, then your message in quotation marks. Hit Enter.

Over time, the Spotlight search function can become sluggish and a little bloated, but you can use Terminal to rebuild its index. Type “sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/DriveName” and replace DriveName with your actual drive name (which will usually be “Macintosh HD”).

If you don’t happen to have a proper paper dictionary or a search engine on hand then Terminal can look up words for you as well. All you need to do is type “curl dict://dict.org/d:word” and replace that final “word” with the one you want defined.

To prevent your Mac’s screen from dimming or initiating the screensaver, you can simply type “caffeinate” into a Terminal window and press Enter (use Ctrl+C to return to normal). Add “-t xx” to specify a duration for the wakefulness, with “xx” the number of seconds. So if you wanted an hour of wakefulness for example, you’d type “caffeinate -t 3600".

You can reveal the files macOS is hiding from you with the “defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool TRUE; killall Finder” command. If you need to hide them again, use the “defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool FALSE; killall Finder” command.

This simple command can come in handy: Just type in “uptime” in the Terminal window to see how long it’s been since you last shut down your Mac. If you can’t remember when the OS was last updated or need to troubleshoot your machine, it can be quite useful.

As with Windows, you can shut down your macOS machine from Terminal, and add a delay if necessary (if something needs to finish first, for instance). The command “sudo shutdown -h now” does a full shutdown, whereas “sudo shutdown -h +5" delays it for five minutes.

Add spaces to the Dock with the “defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add ‘{”tile-type”=”spacer-tile”;}’; killall Dock” command—run it as many times as you want spaces. To get rid of a space you’ve added, just drag it to the Trash.