Published May 10, 2026, 11:15 AM EDT

David has been lifelong fan of technology who loves putting his passion into words.

A journalist by training, he discovered the power of Unix-like operating systems when learning how to edit video on macOS, back when it was still called Mac OS X, in the mid-2000s.

A lover of retrocomputing, he appreciates the vast history of Unix that Linux continues today.

David holds a BA in communication from California State University, East Bay. His writing has appeared in Techopedia, TMCnet , The Motley Fool blog network, and HTG's sister publication MUO , among others.

One of the things I use the terminal for on Windows, in both PowerShell and WSL, is for running basic network diagnostics. Here are the commands I use most frequently.

ping

Is that site up or down?

This is a basic networking command. This was the first one that a community college networking class instructor demonstrated in the Command Prompt.…