YOU’LL NEED THIS

WINDOWS 10 OR 11

45 minutes

WHEN USING COMMAND PROMPT, have you ever needed to list the contents of a folder or drive? If so, then the DIR command has you covered. At first glance, that’s all it can do—and in a less visually accessible way than File Explorer. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find ways in which DIR can play a more active role: use it to quickly perform file searches, generate file lists you can open and edit in any text editor, and even confirm that your precious files are safe when Windows refuses to load. Here, we’ll explain how to use this powerful tool. Note that whenever we use ‘yourname’, you should replace it with your name as it’s registered in your Users folder (it’s ‘nickd’ in our screenshots).

–NICK PEERS

1 LEARN THE BASICS OF DIR

Open Command Prompt (press Win+R, type cmd and press Enter) to find yourself in your personal user folder— for example, C:\Users\yourname. Type dir [ 1 ] [Image A] and press Enter. The command will first list the drive’s label if it has one—it’s ‘System’ in our example [ 2 ]. If there isn’t one, you’ll see ‘Volume in drive C has no label’. Below that will be an alphabetical list of the contents of your user folder.

» Information about each entry is split into five columns [ 3 ]: the first two show the date and time the file or folder was last modified—the same information that’s shown in File Explorer.