The Command Prompt and PowerShell let you open Files or Folders. Learn how to open them using the command line in Windows 11/10.

If you want to open an Elevated Command Prompt, which is one that runs with Administrator privileges, you can see the How to open a Windows 10 Elevated Command Prompt article instead.

The "open" program is specific to OS X and lets you basically drag and drop a file with the -a command onto an application. This way it overrides the per-user OBJ open-with settings.

If you want to execute a task from the command line in Windows, you first have to open Command Prompt. Here are 11 ways to do that.