SPUG: One-liners on Windows via command.com

Tim Maher tim at consultix-inc.com
Fri Mar 25 09:52:12 PST 2005


On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 at 08:49:51AM -0800, Uri London wrote:
> Re: On my XP system, command.com is only 50k in size, but cmd.exe is
> 380k, which so far is the only difference I've noted 8-}
> 
> command.com is a 16 bits application. This is the old DOS interpreter.
> On an XP system it doesn't run by itself, but under the Virtual Dos
> Machine (ntvdm.exe). It is there merely for backward compatibility. Why
> would anyone use command.com?

Speaking from my own experience, I can provide these reasons:

1) Because command.com might be the only name for a Windows hosted
   command-line interpreter that the user knows,
2) or even if the user knew that command.com was a 16 bit app and
   cmd.exe a 32 bit one, he didn't think his Perl one-liner would
   "benefit from the extra bits"
3) or the user might not know how cmd.exe is different, and be
   satisfied to stick with "good old" (feeble) command.com

-Tim
P.S. My experience with Perl on Windows goes all the way back to /yesterday/!

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