Yesterday when wanting to run some commands from the Windows Command Shell, I fired it up on my windows XP desktop, only to find things were a little strange.
For a start it was slower – pasting something in from the clipboard seemed to take time. And then it didn’t protest too much when I started typing things I felt sure shouldn’t work. Then things I wanted to happen didn’t happen when I expected them to.
It all left me a bit confused.
And then I noticed, I’d typed in “command.exe” not “cmd.exe”. I rectified the mistake, and everything seemed to be just fine. But I did wonder what the difference was.
Well, initially, from the above screenshot we can see that the version information has the text is ‘Windows DOS’ vs ‘Windows XP’. However there are a number of other differences:
Cmd.exe is a command-line interface, provided so you can run command-line commands. It is not a DOS window.
Command.com is a stripped-down version of the command processor from DOS. It is a 16-bit application which is used for older DOS compatibility and actually runs inside the NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine) due to its 16-bit nature.
With Command.com we do not have the long name support. Typing in ‘cd program files‘ yields the error ‘Too many parameters – files‘, whereas this command works fine in Cmd.exe. In fact to get this to work in Command.com, we have to type ‘cd progra~1‘.
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