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Windows Command Line Tips and Tricks

Arcy Caparros
3 min readJan 20, 2025

Looking to enhance your Windows command line Fu? Here are some tips and tricks.

File Transfers

Certutil — comes as part of Certificate Services in Windows. While it’s primarily designed for managing digital certificates, it has some hidden talents that make it quite flexible.

We could use certutil.exe to transfer files??? Let’s say you want to transfer a file from your Kali/Linux host to a Windows host.

Source file nc.exe from Kali host

Destination Windows Tools folder

First, in your Kali host load the python module http.server on port 8080

$ python3 -m http.server 8080
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8080 (http://0.0.0.0:8080/)

Then from your Windows host exeucute the certutil.exe command

certutil.exe -urlcache -f http://172.16.70.78:8080 nc.exe nc.exe

  • -urlcache -f = with the -f (force) option to download files from a specified URL and store them in the URL cache
  • http://172.16.70.7 = destination Kali/Linux host that is serving file nc.exe
  • :8080 = custom port instead of using default web port 80
  • nc.exe = file name (save as file name)

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Arcy Caparros
Arcy Caparros

Written by Arcy Caparros

InfoSec, Dad, Jack of All Trades and Master of None

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