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Good bye, cmd
Thu, 2010-04-01 00:44 — Joey
It's been a few years by now I am writing batch files every now and then,
some for trivial tasks, some for things other people would just declare me
insane for doing it with batch files. Anyway, cmd has become boring by now. I now
want to concentrate on another target for writing batch files, one that's still
very much alive, at least on 32-bit systems: command.com.
In a way, cmd was too powerful. It's more fun
the more limited you are so I'll gradually rewrite all batch files on this site
to run in command.com instead. That also
allows them to run on all non-NT versions of Windows as well as DOS. I consider
that to be quite an improvement over the limited platform availability of cmd.
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All content is written by Johannes Rössel and licensed under a Creative Commons By-NC license, unless otherwise noted. Source code is licensed under a 3-clause BSD license, unless otherwise noted.
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cmd.exe is one of the fewest
cmd.exe is one of the fewest things i like in windows, but unfortunately in 64-bit editions there is no full screen (alt+enter) support for it, and developing powershell instead as cmd.exe’s concurent is very annoying for me
I'll bite (and ignore the
I'll bite (and ignore the date): Once you are used to the NT features, it is very hard to go back, and porting to 9×/DOS (or even just with command extensions off) is impossible in most cases.
I catch myself doing more and
I catch myself doing more and more in PowerShell I would previously have done in
cmd. Hard to go back from there, too.What's the diff, anywho?
How, precisely, do cmd and command differ?
Preseidely? I can't say. But
Precisely? I can't say. But probably most lines (except the ubiquitous
@echo off) won't work properly incommand.com. This starts withsetnot supporting prompts or arithmetic, theforloop is severely limited in what it can do, nosetlocal, etc. Then the command line length limit is 128 bytes, not 8190 code units. There really are a few differences that make programming much more painful incommand.com.Anyway, I wasn't really serious anyway.