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Introduction To Windows, Basic DOS Commands
The category Windows commands deals with articles related to internal and external commands supported by members of the Windows family of operating systems including Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE and Windows ME as well as the NT family. Commands which are specific to DOS must be listed in Category:DOS commands (or its sub-categories); commands which exist in both environments must be listed in both Category:DOS commands (or its sub-categories) and Category:Windows commands.
This article presents a list of commands used by DOS operating systems, especially as used on x86-based IBM PC compatibles (PCs). Other DOS operating systems are not part of the scope of this list.
In DOS, many standard system commands were provided for common tasks such as listing files on a disk or moving files. Some commands were built into the command interpreter, others existed as external commands on disk. Over the several generations of DOS, commands were added for the additional functions of the operating system. In the current Microsoft Windows operating system, a text-mode command prompt window, cmd.exe, can still be used.
The command interpreter for DOS runs when no application programs are running. When an application exits, if the transient portion of the command interpreter in memory was overwritten, DOS will reload it from disk. Some commands are internal—built into COMMAND.COM; others are external commands stored on disk. When the user types a line of text at the operating system command prompt, COMMAND.COM will parse the line and attempt to match a command name to a built-in command or to the name of an executable program file or batch file on disk. If no match is found, an error message is printed, and the command prompt is refreshed.
External commands were too large to keep in the command processor, or were less frequently used. Such utility programs would be stored on disk and loaded just like regular application programs but were distributed with the operating system. Copies of these utility command programs had to be on an accessible disk, either on the current drive or on the command path set in the command interpreter.
In the list below, commands that can accept more than one file name, or a filename including wildcards (* and ?), are said to accept a filespec (file specification) parameter. Commands that can accept only a single file name are said to accept a filename parameter. Additionally, command line switches, or other parameter strings, can be supplied on the command line. Spaces and symbols such as a “/” or a “-” may be used to allow the command processor to parse the command line into filenames, file specifications, and other options.
The command interpreter preserves the case of whatever parameters are passed to commands, but the command names themselves and file names are case-insensitive.
Many commands are the same across many DOS systems, but some differ in command syntax or name.A partial list of the most common commands for MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS follows below.
Sets the path to be searched for data files or displays the current search path. The APPEND command is similar to the PATH command that tells DOS where to search for program files (files with a .COM, . EXE, or .BAT file name extension).
The command is available in MS-DOS versions 3.2 and later.
The command redirects requests for disk operations on one drive to a different drive. It can also display drive assignments or reset all drive letters to their original assignments.
The command is available in MS-DOS versions 3 through 5 and IBM PC DOS releases 2 through 5.
Lists connections and addresses seen by Windows ATM call manager.
Attrib changes or views the attributes of one or more files. It defaults to display the attributes of all files in the current directory. The file attributes available include read-only, archive, system, and hidden attributes. The command has the capability to process whole folders and subfolders of files and also process all files.
The command is available in MS-DOS versions 3 and later.
These are commands to backup and restore files from an external disk. These appeared in version 2, and continued to PC DOS 5 and MS-DOS 6 (PC DOS 7 had a deversioned check). In DOS 6, these were replaced by commercial programs (CPBACKUP, MSBACKUP), which allowed files to be restored to different locations.
An implementation of the BASIC programming language for PCs. Implementing BASIC in this way was very common in operating systems on 8- and 16-bit machines made in the 1980s.
IBM computers had BASIC 1.1 in ROM, and IBM’s versions of BASIC used code in this ROM-BASIC, which allowed for extra memory in the code area. BASICA last appeared in IBM PC DOS 5.02, and in OS/2 (2.0 and later), the version had ROM-BASIC moved into the program code.
Microsoft released GW-BASIC for machines with no ROM-BASIC. Some OEM releases had basic.com and basica.com as loaders for GW-BASIC.EXE.
BASIC was dropped after MS-DOS 4, and PC DOS 5.02. OS/2 (which uses PC DOS 5), has it, while MS-DOS 5 does not.
This command is used to instruct DOS to check whether the Ctrl and Break keys have been pressed before carrying out a program request.
The command is available in MS-DOS versions 2 and later.
Starts a batch file from within another batch file and returns when that one ends.
The command is available in MS-DOS versions 3.3 and later.
The CHDIR (or the alternative name CD) command either displays or changes the current working directory.
The command is available in MS-DOS versions 2 and later.
The command either displays or changes the active code page used to display character glyphs in a console window.
The command is available in MS-DOS versions 3.3 and later.