Learn All The New (And Removed) Windows 8 Command Prompt Tools

Windows 8 comes with a couple of new or tweaked commands that may actually be pretty handy if you use the Command Prompt to do things faster on your computer or a bunch of PCs.

Tim Fisher on About.com’s PC Support site details the commands that are new, removed, and altered in Windows 8. A few highlights:

Fondue
The fondue command is no doubt one of the more memorable new commands in Windows 8. It stands for Features on Demand User Experience Tool and it’s used to install any of the several optional Windows 8 features directly from the command line.

Licensingdiag
The licensingdiag command is actually a pretty handy tool. You define an XML and a CAB file to create and Windows 8 will generate both, full of information about your Windows 8 installation, specifically product activation and registration related data.

New switches for the shutdown command are also useful to know, especially if you want to create a shutdown tile on Windows 8’s start screen:

The shutdown command features two new switches over shutdown in Windows 7.

The first, /o, can be used with /r (shutdown and restart) to end the current Windows session and display the Advanced Startup Options menu. This change makes sense due to the fact that, unlike in older versions of Windows, the diagnostic features in Windows 8 are accessible without first restarting the computer.

The second new switch, /hybrid, performs a shutdown and then prepares the computer for Fast Startup, a feature introduced in Windows 8.

Fisher has also compiled perhaps the most comprehensive and up-to-date list of all commands available across every version of Windows, which is pretty impressive.

Of course, if you want more powerful command line ninja abilities, we recommend you make the Windows Command Prompt better.

New (and Removed) Commands in Windows 8 [About.com PC Support]