More advanced commands for Windows: SFC and shutdown

To deepen your knowledge about the commands available for the Windows command line as well as the functionality they are offering, you should check this article which will provide you with the crucial details about the SFC and shutdown commands.

SFC

This command stands for System file checker. Yes, this command does what the name implies. SFC scans, detects and restore any important and crucial Windows system files, folders and paths. This is one of the commands you can run when your system is not quite working the way you expect it to be or you run into strange behaviour such as BSoD (blue screen of death).

Blue screen of death is something you suddenly see, your entire screen filled with blue color with an error message typically with some sort of error code. These are the times when, if you manage to get access to the command line, you can easily run this command and typically should fix these issues unless your system requires some other fixes, well that is for another time.

The way sfc works is, if you run this and it find some sort of corrupted files or issues, it tries to replace the corrupted files from the cached DLLs, which is the backups of those file system usually located in the path like Windows/ System32/Dllcache/directory. You can test run this command by sfc /scannow and hit enter. This will scan the necessary directories and files and give you a result. For further information, feel free to use the /? card.

Shutdown

Shutdown command as the name implies, enables you to shut down a local or remote computer or reboot it. This is not it and there are more hacky parts coming along with it like, you can use combos of switches to achieve a certain outcome. Such as to control and report the shut down for instance. This is a great tool for system administrator or network administrator to restart a remote computer. Such as by running a command like this – Shutdown /r /m \\testserver.

Here, the /r switch tells the system to reboot or restart than to shutdown completely. There are always more to the game than this. Feel free to run shutdown /? to know more about the existing switches that comes along with this command.

Typing these commands over and over again might get tedious. Therefore, Microsoft already provided tool you can use to utilize in command line. For instance, if you have typed dir. Now press f1 and the command will gradually appear one letter at a time from the very initial letter. If you press f3, this will show you the whole command you previously typed in. If you ran multiple commands, you can use up and down arrow on your keyboard to get all those previously typed in commands.