

The Command Prompt typically provides a less abstracted interaction with the operating system and provides greater functionality and efficiency over a graphical interface. Today, the Command Prompt is a useful tool used typically by system administrators, help desk technician or similar to troubleshooting or administer a system. It involved typing command in the proper syntax to get a computer to perform various task - such as copying a file, re-naming a file, or launch a program. Prior to a development of an operating system with a graphical interface (such as Windows) where you interact with it with mouse clicks, the Command Prompt (aka DOS prompt) was the primary means to use a computer. ping 192.168.0.The Command Prompt, also referred to as Command-Line or CMD, is a text-based program used to issue commands to your computer operating system. Once we have the IP address we can use ping to check the connection. For that you will need to scan for devices on your network. To check an internal connection, we will need to know the IP address of a device on the network. Part of testing a network is checking that we can connect to another machine and with ping we can check our internal and external connections. The findstr command can be used with many different commands, and using extra pipes we can direct the output to other tools / applications. In this example we are searching for the Host Name of our machine. Here is an example using the ipconfig /all command, piping the output via “|” to become the input of findstr, where we specify the search string in quotes.

So how can we filter out the noise and target the data that we need? Using the findstr command we can pass strings to search for in the output of a command.
