Two Command Line Tricks

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Watching a co-worker type can be a good tool for learning new tricks. I always ask "How did you just do that?" when I see something fly by a bit too quickly. I just learned two of them in the last half hour.

  1. If there is a command in your history but you don't want to push the up arrow to find it, you can start typing the command and then press F8 to complete it.
  2. Type "dir | clip" and then open Notepad. Paste from the clipboard to reveal the output of the dir command you ran before. You can use this to pipe any command line output to the clipboard. Type "clip /?" for full details.