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Desktop Shortcut to DOS 1
- Thread starter Matheny
- Start date
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As it is the Holiday season and all,
I cannot imagine not having a shortcut on the desktop to the Windows help .chm for the syntax issues of DOS and Windows commands.
I use it frequently, and keep discovering hidden gems in Windows. (Have you explored all .exe, and .vbs files in \winnt\system32 ?
Create a small batch file in \winnt\system32 or other pathed drives, and point as the Target of a new desktop shortcut the batch file.
Reference:
I cannot imagine not having a shortcut on the desktop to the Windows help .chm for the syntax issues of DOS and Windows commands.
I use it frequently, and keep discovering hidden gems in Windows. (Have you explored all .exe, and .vbs files in \winnt\system32 ?
Create a small batch file in \winnt\system32 or other pathed drives, and point as the Target of a new desktop shortcut the batch file.
Reference:
More on the commandline:
The "HELP" command will give a list of available commands.
CommandName /? will give a detailed screen of options available for that command.
I was bought up on DOS and still use the command line extensively for mass file manipulation - it is far quicker using wildcards than right clicking, and dragging or altering properties etc on several files. I can still remember command syntax from the top of my head for 99% of the known commands and write batch files in my sleep.
Matheny:
CMD.EXE is not "DOS" as it was in earlier OSes up to 98SE/Me - because it doesn't run under the Win2000 GUI. It would be better described as a Command Line Interpreter.
John
The "HELP" command will give a list of available commands.
CommandName /? will give a detailed screen of options available for that command.
I was bought up on DOS and still use the command line extensively for mass file manipulation - it is far quicker using wildcards than right clicking, and dragging or altering properties etc on several files. I can still remember command syntax from the top of my head for 99% of the known commands and write batch files in my sleep.
Matheny:
CMD.EXE is not "DOS" as it was in earlier OSes up to 98SE/Me - because it doesn't run under the Win2000 GUI. It would be better described as a Command Line Interpreter.
John
John,
"CMD.EXE is not "DOS" as it was in earlier OSes up to 98SE/Me - because it doesn't run under the Win2000 GUI. It would be better described as a Command Line Interpreter."
Small quibble.
The "DOS" available through a CMD session is perfectly capable shell.
It is in my opinion an improvement on the earlier (and still available) command shell.
A lot of jumping through hoops in earlier .bat scripting is avoided with such features as START and FOR and the use of macro variable expansion.
I agree it is not the same "DOS" but I also feel it is an improvement.
And with the Microsoft support of MSH on all platforms, it is truely amazing what now can be done.
I really like the "DOS" changes made for the NT family.
"CMD.EXE is not "DOS" as it was in earlier OSes up to 98SE/Me - because it doesn't run under the Win2000 GUI. It would be better described as a Command Line Interpreter."
Small quibble.
The "DOS" available through a CMD session is perfectly capable shell.
It is in my opinion an improvement on the earlier (and still available) command shell.
A lot of jumping through hoops in earlier .bat scripting is avoided with such features as START and FOR and the use of macro variable expansion.
I agree it is not the same "DOS" but I also feel it is an improvement.
And with the Microsoft support of MSH on all platforms, it is truely amazing what now can be done.
I really like the "DOS" changes made for the NT family.
John,
There is life in the command line, although the general OS drift is to the GUI side of things.
There is a strong hard core group inside the Microsoft OS developer group that fights hard to preserve command line tools for the OS.
All they need to do to get approval is to say to Bill Gates "Well in Linux I could just type ....." and the command line features are preserved and often improved.
I hope the command line features of the OS do not go away. Again, there is a hard core group who would fight this and have led to some terrrific features.
There is life in the command line, although the general OS drift is to the GUI side of things.
There is a strong hard core group inside the Microsoft OS developer group that fights hard to preserve command line tools for the OS.
All they need to do to get approval is to say to Bill Gates "Well in Linux I could just type ....." and the command line features are preserved and often improved.
I hope the command line features of the OS do not go away. Again, there is a hard core group who would fight this and have led to some terrrific features.
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Many of the new command line utilities are direct ports of Unix/Linux software. Whenever you see -? used over /? you can be fairly sure the command or feature was born from Unix. The hyphen - prefix is used extensively in Unix and Linux while the forward slash / is used in native DOS and NT. Microsoft has worked to migrate many of the functions fully over to NT, but there are a lot of tell-tale signs of their origins.
Nathan aka: zaz (zaznet)
zaz@zaz.net
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