Windows server 2008 core commands reference

Each shell is a software program that provides direct communication between you and the operating system or application, providing an environment to automate IT operations. The Command shell was the first shell built into Windows to automate routine tasks, like user account management or nightly backups, with batch.

With Windows Script Host, you could run more sophisticated scripts in the Command shell. For more information, see cscript or wscript. You can perform operations more efficiently by using scripts than you can by using the user interface.

Scripts accept all commands that are available at the command line. PowerShell was designed to extend the capabilities of the Command shell to run PowerShell commands called cmdlets. Cmdlets are similar to Windows Commands but provide a more extensible scripting language. A reference of exit and error codes for Windows Commands can be found in the Debug system error codes articles that may be helpful to understanding errors produced.

You can configure the Command shell to automatically complete file and directory names on a computer or user session when a specified control character is pressed.

By default this control character is configured to be the tab key for both file and directory names, although they can be different. To change this control character, run regedit. Skip to main content. This browser is no longer supported. Download Microsoft Edge More info. Contents Exit focus mode. Note This topic includes sample Windows PowerShell cmdlets that you can use to automate some of the procedures described.

Note If Slmgr. Note Servers in Server Core mode cannot access the Internet through a proxy that requires a password to allow connections. In this article. You can set a date, time, or time zone using a graphical tool intl. If you want to add additional users to the local administrators group, you can configure a Group Policy or add them manually:.

Or you may activate your host on a KMS server. You can find information about how to configure Windows Defender Firewall with PowerShell in this article. I will just show some basic commands here.

To manage update options, it is better to use Windows Update Group Policies. However, you can set the update settings manually. To install and manage updates from the command prompt, it is convenient to use the PSWindowsUpdate module for PowerShell. To get a list of all installed roles and features in Windows Server thus you can quickly understand what the server is used for :.

To manage processes, you can use the Task Manager taskmgr. Information about the status and health of physical disks the default Storage disk management module is used :. Free disk space information :. To download and extract a ZIP file from an external website:. To copy all files from a directory to a remote computer over the network, you can use the Copy-Item cmdlet:. You can install it as follows:. In this article, I tried to collect the most useful commands needed to administer Windows Server Core.

From time to time, I will update the article and add new commands if they seem necessary for everyday work.