Help Command

Help command examples, options, switches, & more

By
Tim Fisher
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Tim Fisher
Senior Vice President & Group General Manager, Tech & Sustainability
  • Emporia State University
Tim Fisher has more than 30 years' of professional technology experience. He's been writing about tech for more than two decades and serves as the SVP and General Manager of Lifewire.
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Updated on January 24, 2023
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The help command is a Command Prompt command that's used to provide more information on another command.

You can use the help command at any time to learn more about a command's usage and syntax, like which options are available and how to actually structure the command to use its various options.

help command in Windows 10 command prompt
'help dir' Command in Windows 10.

Help Command Availability

The help command is available from within the Command Prompt in all Windows operating systems, including Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and others.

The help command is also a DOS command available in MS-DOS.

The availability of certain help command switches and other help command syntax may differ from operating system to operating system.

Help Command Syntax

help [command] [/?]

Learn how to read command syntax in Windows if you need help understanding the syntax as it's written above or displayed in the table below.

Help Command Options
Item Explanation
help Execute the help command without options to produce a list of commands that are usable with the help command.
command This option specifies the command that you would like to display help information for. Some commands are not supported by the help command. If you need information about unsupported commands, the help switch can be used instead.
/? The help switch can be used with the help command. Executing help is the same as executing help /?.

You can save the output of the help command to a file using a redirection operator with the command. 

Help Command Examples

Here are some examples showing how the help command can be used:

Ver Command Help 

 help ver

In this example, the full help information for the ver command is displayed on the screen, which might look something like this: Displays the Windows version.

Robocopy Command Help 

 help robocopy

Just as in the previous example, the syntax and other information on how to use the robocopy command are displayed. However, unlike the ver command, robocopy has lots of options and information, so the command prompt displays a lot more information than just one sentence like you might see with some commands like ver.

Help Related Commands

Due to the nature of the help command, it's used with just about every other command in existence, like rd, print, xcopy, wmic, schtasks, path, pause, more, move, label, prompt, diskpart, color, chkdsk, attrib, assoc, echo, goto, format, and cls.

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