I am trying to find out if there is a way to use the run utility in windows xp for doing things like creating a directory in an existing directory and so on. I have tried using the commands that you would use in the command line interface and they dont seem to work. Is there a list of commands to do things like this using just the run utility in windows? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

When you are at a command prompt, you are running within cmd.exe. When you use "run" its not running within cmd.exe. However, you can RUN cmd.exe passing in /c (which tells it to terminate at the end of the command) then followed by the command. For example: (in the run box) cmd.exe /c mkdir c:\blah If you open a command prompt, and type in cmd.exe /? then you can see all the parameters available.

What would I type in to get the system time using the run command?

cmd.exe /k time see help and support pages on cmd.