General consumers rarely make use of the command line embedded in operating systems. The graphical user interface (GUI) is often adequate to provide the needed features to said users. There are times though that being used to GUI ensures that certain features of the command line are unknown and hence not used. The command line simplifies and enhances the ability to perform certain desired tasks. None is existentially better; they have various use cases and thus present different results for different tasks. The GUI simplifies some tasks, while the command line presents the optimal environment for other goals. The tasks executed on the command line are commands (surprise!). In Microsoft windows, it groups commands broadly into “internal” and “external” commands.

Internal commands are common in most operating systems as they execute basic tasks such as “copy”, “move”, “delete”. Windows stores internal commands in the systems interpreter. For windows systems, the interpreter is in cmd.exe or command.com in older DOS versions. Thus, additional files or configurations are unnecessary for internal commands to function.

External commands need extra files and configurations to run. The external commands available for each operating system vary with each history of use. System administrators download external commands and include them in an operating system. They must carry such actions out with a load of care as loads and loads of malicious versions of such plugins exist on the internet.

External commands are not in use widely but offer useful and efficient methods to perform various tasks on the computer. They are especially useful to system administrators. When properly set up, they can run external commands with methods indistinguishable from internal commands.

Sometimes, external commands are embedded in operating systems. One of such case in the windows environment is the “ICACLS” command. This command allows the user to change and view the Access Control Lists (ACL) of files and folders. To this using the Graphical User Interface (GUI), the user would need to click around to get this done for each file and folder. If they need a minute number of modifications each time, this could be a venerable method. It could, however, quickly become a tedious task if a huge number of files or folders need modification. The solution to this conundrum is the ICACLS command. The capabilities and use cases for the ICACLS are many and beneficial. To view these capabilities, open the command prompt or windows power shell and type “icacls” press enter. This gives the list of switches and parameters that the command can accept. To view the ACL for a particular file or folder type, “icacls ‘file name’” or “icacls ‘folder/path’” respectively.

The command is available in Windows Vista and Windows 7, both currently out of their mainstream support cycle by Microsoft. The command is available in Windows 8, 8.1, 10 and 11. This further illustrates the usefulness of this tool. It has survived 6 major iterations of the windows operating system; it really must be a handy tool.