Microsoft recently decided to make a fairly minor change in Windows 10 that led to some misleading headlines about the impending death of CMD.EXE. Microsoft has now posted a nice blog post explaining clearly that the old command prompt isn’t going anywhere. I still use cmd.exe for some stuff, and PowerShell for other stuff. I’ve never gotten entirely comfortable with PowerShell, and I still find myself needing to search the web to figure out how to get stuff done with it, but it’s definitely quite useful, once you’ve gotten the hang of it.
I’m probably just as proficient with PowerShell as I am with bash. (Which is to say, not nearly as proficient as I’d like to be, but good enough to get by.) It’s kind of funny that bash has been around since 1989 and is still so popular. It’s pretty easy to switch to a different command shell in Linux (or other Unix variants), and it used to be common to see people trying out different shells, but it seems like bash has won out over all the others. And, of course, you can now get a good bash shell in Windows, which is pretty cool.
Long ago, back in the MS-DOS days, I was a big fan of JP Software’s 4DOS, which was a replacement for COMMAND.COM. They’re still around, and their current product is called Take Command. I paid for an upgrade to it about a year ago, and gave it a spin, but I had some issues with it, and gave up on it. I may upgrade to the new version and give it another try; it’s got quite a lot of functionality, though it’s gotten pretty hairy over the years. The best example is probably the TPIPE command, which is very powerful, but not at all elegant.
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