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Originally Posted by eschwartz
Yes, there are all sorts of third-party tools to make cmd.exe useful.
It would be nice, though, if MS could maybe do that natively, so you don't have to install a bunch of stuff just to get basic usability. At this point, it is almost not worth including the command prompt itself, after all, I can just install it with the other stuff.  |
Back in the day, I ran 4DOS to replace COMMAND.COM under MS-DOS (when I wasn't running the MKS Toolkit's version of the Korn shell.) MS talked to 4DOS vendor JP Software about licensing it for inclusion in MS-DOS, but JP principals Tom Rawson and Rex Conn didn't like the deal offered and declined. The MS rep threatened that MS would enhance COMMAND.COM instead and kill 4DOS's market, but it never happened. This came as no surprise to Tom, Rex, or any other 4DOS users. (The Norton Utilities
did license a version of 4DOS for inclusion with their package, that they called NDOS.)
I was installing third-party software to add things that arguably should have been in DOS to begin with since the DOS 2.X days, and I didn't expect that necessity to go away. I was not disappointed in my assumption.
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All of those are nice options, though.  Thanks for the suggestions.
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You're welcome.
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Currently, I will stick with cygwin as it doesn't require admin rights to install (school computer), and does both jobs in one. And it's familiar.
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If it's what you are familiar with, stick with it. I dropped it as overkill for my needs when things like what I pointed to became available. Cygwin ports the Gnu development toolchain to Win32, and assumes you will be doing development in a POSIX environment using GCC. I'm not, and just wanted a *nix shell and set of command line utilities I was used to under *nix. Cygwin was far more than I required, and required fiddling to deal with the differences between the DOS/Windows and *nix PATH separator and option delimiter chars.
Native Win32 versions of various things relieved that problem.
(The MKS Toolkit under DOS included a SWITCH utility to let you change the MS-DOS option delimiter char from / to -. Do so, and you could use /
or \ in PATH statements. (One version of DOS let you do that in CONFIG.SYS.) When MS-DOS 5 came out, there was concern among Toolkit users, because DOS 5
removed the system call that let you change the option delimiter, but
kept the one that queried what is
was. (Don't ask me...) As it turned out, the Toolkit still worked as expected under DOS 5. If it hadn't, I would have stayed put at 3.3.
)
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Dennis