Home > IT > Command History in Windows Command Prompt

Command History in Windows Command Prompt

May 6th, 2007 Leave a comment Go to comments

I always love learning something fairly basic, that in the long run will make my day run more smoothly. Even better than that is learning it by mistake. That's what happened to me today. I managed to accidentally hit F7 and up popped a history in my command prompt. Every command I had typed in was laid out nice and neatly for me. (Yes... all those commands are legit.. the first thing I do with a Windows box is install the unixutils package). Anyways you can scroll up and down and then press enter to re-execute a command. I tried this on XP (both Home and Professional) but not on other versions of Windows. It's probably existed for quite some time and it's probably common knowledge... but it's something I just picked up.
Command History

Categories: IT Tags:

This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.

  1. teh
    May 7th, 2007 at 11:21 | #1
    Reply | Quote

    i didn’t know this one as well.
    previously, i was just using the ‘arrow up’ to retrieve history one by one.

  2. kuza55
    May 8th, 2007 at 07:02 | #2
    Reply | Quote

    I used to do what teh said as well, this will probably end up being rather useful.

    Do you by any chance know if the windows command history persists (either in memory or on disk after a command window is closed, and if this data can somehow be extracted?

  3. Tyler Reguly
    May 8th, 2007 at 10:53 | #3
    Reply | Quote

    @kuza55

    I’ve never heard of the Command Prompt history persisting… and I’m unaware of anything similar to the *nix .history file… However that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

  4. sammy
    July 20th, 2007 at 07:58 | #4
    Reply | Quote

    In case this is also news, you can press F9 while in the menu displayed by pressing F7. Pressing F9 results in a prompt for the menu number of the command you wish to execute.

    Furthermore, at the command prompt you can use F3 for the last command, and F8 repeatedly to go backwards through the history, one command at a time.

    Finally, F2 allows you to copy a previous command up to the letter you enter.

    I think these all come from the old DosKey program…

  5. sShah
    July 16th, 2008 at 07:29 | #5
    Reply | Quote

    A simple DOSKEY /HISTORY would do the same, that is retrieving history of all typed command line. You can even pipe it to a, say text file; great for documentation. I know this because it helps me a lot when I need to prepare user manual for any application installation or that sort of stuff.. Cheerio :)

  6. nils
    August 6th, 2008 at 06:45 | #6
    Reply | Quote

    This is very nice feature..
    My work get very easy after knowing this feature
    Thanks buddy…

  1. No trackbacks yet.