Working with the BITS command-line client in Windows 10

BITS or Background Intelligent Transfer Service is a nice little feature gem built into Windows. It allows you to do resumable HTTP downloads that can handle connection interruptions and transfer data silently in the background, without taking all the network bandwidth to itself.

Since at least Windows XP, Windows has had a command-line client called "BitsAdmin" that you could have used from the traditional command prompt. In Windows 10, this client is still available, but if you run the utility, you will get the following message:

BITSADMIN version 3.0
BITS administration utility.
(C) Copyright 2000-2006 Microsoft Corp.
BITSAdmin is deprecated and is not guaranteed to be
available in future versions of Windows.
Administrative tools for the BITS service are now
provided by BITS PowerShell cmdlets.

That is, in the future, only the PowerShell command versions are available. To find these, start PowerShell and type in "help bits". This will list cmdlets like Start-BitsTransfer, Add-BitsFile and Complete-BitsTransfer.

Hope this helps!