In this tutorial, I will show you how you can use Command Prompt to create text files. It is very simple and you can also use it to write output from a command into a text file. This can be particularly useful when you need documentation from a DOS program in a text file when you use the help command or something similar.

In order to do this you simply use this DOS command.


This will create a new text file called test and echo the contents into it. If we wanted to write a 2 line document, we could do something like:


The Command Prompt automatically does linebreaks each time the command is used.

I also stated that you can put documentation into a text file this way.
I will use the Perl documentation command as an example.


That will put the output from perldoc into the file perldoc.txt.

Thanks for reading this material and have fun doing text writing the old school way.

It's really nice. But what if I have to create multiple line documents. Can I just type and echo it to the txt file?

Whenever you use the echo command, it automatically creates a linebreak. I think it might not be able to create linebreaks in a single echo statement though.

could you explain this better for people who don't get command prompt/learning command prompt?

I don't see myself using something like this anytime in the future, but knowledge is always a good thing. Thanks for the tutorial.

Replying to suberatu

What if I want edit the first line of a text document "//Easting, Northing, Depth" to be "Easting, Northing, Depth" but the file is too large to open in any text editing program (700 mb)

Well that is one way to do it, but an easier way to edit text is available. Pretend we have a file in our desktop called "test.Txt" without the quotations. To edit this file, you can type the following command:

Copy con test.Txt

To use this, you should be in the same directory as the file, so, in a Windows computer your command would actually look like this:

C:\Documents and Settings\User\Desktop> copy con test.Txt

BE WARNED: This overwrites ALL OF YOUR TEXT! It is very useful to create a new document, but for editing an existing document it would be easier to just type this:

Notepad test.Txt

So it opens instead of overwriting

-reply by Jesse