The Command-Line Interface - Windows Server Tutorial

In this course we will primarily be using the GUI, or the graphical user interface. However, there is another interface that can be used in Server 2012. That interface is called the command line interface or the CLI. The way you get to the command line interface from the GUI is to go up to tools and click the PowerShell option. Clicking the PowerShell option will bring up this screen. This screen is called a command-line interface. The advantage of a command-line interface, is that it allows you to type in commands and then execute them without having to tunnel through a number of graphical interfaces. The command-line interface also gives Windows the capability to allow you to script a long series of commands, and then run it automatically multiple times without interference from you. To get more information about the command line interface, you can simply type the help option here on the command line, and press Enter. This will bring up useful information about command line, but most importantly, it will refer you to the online help. This URL will point you to a location where you can find lots of different information about commands, as well as a lot of the commands you're able to use. Now, in Windows, there is also something called the Server Core Mode. The server core mode forces the computer to boot directly into command line interface, rather than booting into the GUI. While we are in the GUI, we can use the command line to force Windows Server 2012 to boot into the server core mode. The way we force Windows Server 2012 to boot into server core mode is to use the following command. This command is referred to as a command list inside the Windows environment. This commandlet actually strings together a series of commands. The first command in this commandlet is the uninstall command. This tells the computer we are about to uninstall something. Windows feature tells the computer that the thing we are about to uninstall is a feature of Windows. Next we have a space and then we have the server GUI management interface. This is telling the computer that one of the futures we are removing is the GUI manager interface. We also have a command here that says server GUI shell. This is telling the computer that we are also removing the server GUI shell. Restart tells the computer that we are going to restart after executing this command. So, to execute the command you press Enter. Now that the system has restarted, let's go ahead and log in. So far, everything looks just like it did originally. However, let's see what happens once we finish the log in process. This is it, this is Server Core mode. As you can see, there's no fancy GUI. There's nothing there, except a command line interface. This is what you would get if you chose Server Core during the installation process. However, there is good news. If you chose Server Core by accident, we can always bring up the GUI from here. The way we do that is to first bring up the PowerShell, and the command to bring up the PowerShell is powershell. Now that we are in the PowerShell, we want to enter the opposite of the command we entered previously. The command we want to use is as follows. There are a couple of things I want you to notice about this. One is the command did not fit on a single line. That is okay. The command automatically scrolled down to the next line. The other thing I want to point out to you is how this command works. Previously, we were uninstalling the WindowsFeature Server GUI Management Infrastructure and Server GUI Shell. This time, instead of Uninstall, we are using the command Install. So that means we are installing the Windows features Server gui management interface and server gui shell. We will then restart the server once that command has been executed. So let's go ahead and hit enter to execute the command and restart the server. As you can see, we are doing the same process as before, except in reverse. Once the server has rebooted, we will have our GUI interface back.