How to copy text from a DOS window

We’re going to show you how to copy text from a DOS window. You know those (usually) black dialog windows you see when you press the Windows Key plus the “R” key, type CMD and press Enter.

Most of us who have used the command prompt have wanted to copy the information from it and paste it in a text file or an email – or in our case – a Web page. Why? Well that’s a good question – so we’ll give you an example:

Press the Windows Key, plus the “R” key and type CMD into the command line and press Enter. At the prompt, type IPCONFIG /All .

If you followed the instructions above correctly, you now have a box showing you a lot of information about your Internet connection, your IP address, and other arcane stuff. So how do you copy all that information so you can paste it into a text file, a document or an email? You can’t use Ctrl+A to copy it all and you can’t highlight and use Ctrl+C. Try it.

But you can copy it – and paste it into a test file, document or an email.

See?

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7600]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

(The rest of the content removed for brevity.)

If you only want to copy part of the information, you can do that too:

Windows IP Configuration

Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : POE
Primary Dns Suffix . . . . . . . :
Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Hybrid
IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No
WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No

So what’s the trick? Here’s how you do it – the easy way:

Right-click on the title bar. If you want to copy everything inside the DOS window, choose “Edit” then “Select All”. Everything inside the DOS window will be selected. But wait! You can’t right-click in the windows and choose “Copy”. As soon as you click (right or left-click) inside that Window, nothing will be highlighted and you’ll have to start over. So, when everything is highlighted, right-click again on the title bar and choose “Copy” (copy will not be grayed-out if you have selected text in the box). Once you’ve clicked “Copy” all of the text which was highlighted will be copied to the Windows clipboard; you can then paste it wherever you want.

If you only want to select some of the information in the box, right-click on the title bar and choose “Mark”. Return to the DOS window and you’ll see a large square cursor. You can drag it over the text you want to copy to select it. Once the text is selected, right-click on the title bar again and choose “Copy”. The selected text will be copied and you can paste it in to a text file, document, email or Web page using Ctrl-V.

There are a lot of Windows commands you can run to get more information about your computer, and sometimes you’ll want to copy it and paste the information somewhere so you can save it. And guess what? Now you know how. Ain’t it great?

This tip works in all versions of Windows from Windows XP through Windows 8x.