MS-DOS also lurks around on the 386 and Pentium I have in the closet. I’ve considered releasing them into the wild, but I fear that like dairy cattle, they can no longer fend for themselves.
The breeding program has yet to have its first success.
I have 10 OS2-Warp servers here at work, hidden amongst the Windows servers. Almost everything I run on them is done from a DOS window, including all the scheduling which is done with CRON2.
Even on my 2000 PC, I use my DOS window more than I use Explorer… old habits die hard I guess.
And I have made the dreaded <Del .> mistake. I thought I was in a subdirectory but I was actually in the main directory.
Restore is my Friend!!
From the original email it sounds like there was more of a problem with FDISK than with the .COM extension. 
So what does the Red Matrix command do? Is it like the History Eraser Button?
Well, you see, there’s the Red Matrix command, and the Blue Matrix command, and you have to choose just one… 
Sorry, I can’t do your experiment, as I have no access to DOS, but I can assure you that in *nix, . does not include filenames beginning with ., such as .cshrc, .xemacs, .ispell, etc. However, I did find that . includes filenames ending with a dot. So I ammend my pedantic statement: . includes all filenames with at least one dot that is not the first character under Unix.
Do DOS and Unix do globs differently?
in bash, ls * lists only files that don’t start with a dot, and lists the first-level contents of directories.
ls . does not list .bash_profile or any of the other hidden files.
In a sane regular expression, as defined by PCRE, the * refers to 0 or more incidences of the thing before the *. a * without anything before it would probably match a literal * (though I haven’t tested this; safer to use a * if that’s what you want ). Whereas a . matches any character. So . would match any string starting with an asterisk. But hey, whoever said DOS was sane? On the other hand, in it’s defense, DOS isn’t claiming to do regular expressions, but filename globs.
Do I win the pedanticness prize yet?
Because dotfiles (anything starting with a dot) are normally “hidden” in Unix-like environments, it’s pretty standard for * at the start of a glob not to match a leading dot. Arguably, that’s semantically wrong, but it’s also the right thing to do, since it protects against “pilot error” commands zapping something that the user didn’t know was there.
We still use *.com files on an OpenVMS platform where I work.