I often hear that Windows is a bad operating system, because you have to do everything from GUI, I totally disagree with such a statement. Windows has many very useful tool in its command line interface. Not to mention Power Shell, in which you can script almost everything. In that blog post I will present a quick How-To on sharing a folder from command line.

Display Shares

To share a folder from command line we use net share command. By simply typing net share command, we will be returned the list of all shares in the system.

C:\Users\KrystianZieja\Documents>net share

Share name   Resource                        Remark

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
C$           C:\                             Default share
IPC$                                         Remote IPC
ADMIN$       C:\Windows                      Remote Admin
The command completed successfully.

Sharing a folder

To share a folder we have to use net share with providing share name and path to disk resources

c:\Users\KrystianZieja\Documents>net share testShare=C:\Users\KrystianZieja\Docu
ments\test
testShare was shared successfully.

c:\Users\KrystianZieja\Documents>net share

Share name   Resource                        Remark

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C$           C:\                             Default share
IPC$                                         Remote IPC
ADMIN$       C:\Windows                      Remote Admin
testShare    C:\Users\KrystianZieja\Documents\test

The command completed successfully.

Advanced Sharing

Using net share command we can also set permissions on a share we are creating, like in the example below. Instead of CHANGE, we can use READ or FULL.

c:\Users\KrystianZieja\Documents>net share test2=C:\Users\KrystianZieja\Document
s\test2 /GRANT:MBOOK\alien,CHANGE
test2 was shared successfully.

Share Properties

The command net share also allows us to setup maximum users per share and add share commands.

c:\Users\KrystianZieja\Documents>net share

Share name   Resource                        Remark

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
C$           C:\                             Default share
IPC$                                         Remote IPC
ADMIN$       C:\Windows                      Remote Admin
test2        C:\Users\KrystianZieja\Documents\test2

testShare    C:\Users\KrystianZieja\Documents\test
                                             My Test Comment

Deleting Shares

To delete a share using net share we use the following syntax: net share shareName /delete

c:\Users\KrystianZieja\Documents>net share test2 /delete
test2 was deleted successfully.


c:\Users\KrystianZieja\Documents>net share testShare /delete
testShare was deleted successfully.


c:\Users\KrystianZieja\Documents>net share

Share name   Resource                        Remark

--------------------------------------------------------------
C$           C:\                             Default share
IPC$                                         Remote IPC
ADMIN$       C:\Windows                      Remote Admin
The command completed successfully.