Introduction

Let’s face it, while GUI applications are nice and they do provide significant levels of hand holding, they’re cumbersome and inefficient. The command line is an essential part of the administrator experience—at least, if the administrator wants to go home at night and spend weekends somewhere other than work. Using the command line can often provide faster results with far less effort. In addition, the command line lends itself to easy automation, so you might not need to manually perform some tasks at all; you can let the computer do them while you have a cup of coffee and gab with a friend in the next cubicle. However, no one can memorize every command, or even a significant subset of them, so Windows Command-Line Administration Instant Reference provides you with a quick reference for the common commands and provides examples of their use to help you avoid potential errors. In short, if you want to spend time doing something other than adding users to the server, you need this book!