It must be true I read/heard it in the news!

[Garrett Goebel]

Brian Densmore wrote:
>
> http://news.com.com/2001-7344_3-0.html?tag=nefd_guts
[...]
>
> A Windows command line-only version? Umm... don't they mean
> DOS ?.?
>
> Windows command line a far cry from DOS?
> Ummm... where do they dig these reporters up. There should be
> a law, that in order to write about a subject you have to
> actually understand what you are talking about. The command
> line in Windows ***IS*** DOS, or what is left of it. The
> command line in Windows is nothing more than a window running
> a DOS shell.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone...

On Windows NT there are 2 command shells: CMD.EXE AND COMMAND.COM.

CMD.EXE is the NT native command shell and sports new features and syntax in
each successive windows OS, and has worked under all supported
architectures.  CMD.EXE is ***NOT*** DOS, or what is left of it. No 16-bit
virtual DOS machine is invoked when CMD.EXE is launched. CMD.EXE is no more
DOS than Bash is Linux.

COMMAND.COM was the attempt at a DOS backward compatible shell. If you
started COMMAND.COM and checked the process list, you'd notice it ran inside
the NTVDM process. NTVDM was the NT Virtual DOS Machine which provided
backward support for 16-bit DOS programs so long as they didn't attempt
direct access to hardware.

Try opening CMD.EXE on the various flavors of NT: NT3.51, NT40, W2K, XP,
W2K3. Read the documentation for: if, set, for. You'll notice things like
additional support for localized variables, subroutines via call context,
comparison operators, numeric evaluation, improved loops, setting
environment variables interactively via command-line input, partial string
extraction, and string substitution among others. It's still ugly, but as
the article said... its a far cry better than what you had to work with with
the DOS command shell.

The CMD.EXE of XP shares about the same resemblance to the DOS command shell
as bash does to sh.

--
Garrett Goebel
IS Development Specialist

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