It’s also handy to have a way into the system that avoids some of the hijack/ virus/ malfunction issues that exist in Windows. It wouldn’t be very good to have an IPConfig utility on your Window desktop, or built into IE or Windows explorer, if you couldn’t secure it from hackers. The same thing applies to many other (psuedo) DOS level commands – keeping them behind a separate shell is a good security feature, even if that wasn’t the intention.
Gnome is a graphical environment/UI for the X Window System, requiring a separate window manager.
Oh. Heh. Oops. Well, I went into System/Preferences/Mouse, and there’s nothing there except mouse cursor sensitivity, double-click stuff, and drag/drop. How do I change this?
I think what you are looking for is in System/Preferences/Windows
Why do the *tech people * call it a DOS prompt? That’s not something the users made up.
come on people we can nit pick all day it doesnt really matter. a koala bear is not a god damn bear and yet its called that in common tounge! if people wanna call the command line interface a dos prompt let them.
In the command prompt, you run commands. The only limit is your own knowledge of commands and utilities.
Firing up the command prompt, and in a matter of seconds I can create a file in my file system, or a user account in Active Directory, or export meta data from Active Directory to a text file, or edit that text file, or take a backup of it, or encrypt it, or check for hard disk failures, or get a list of all files beginning with xyz in folder so-and-so, or change permissions on those files, or ask if there somebody who’s name Wakin-somthing and in the same run check which security groups he is a member of, or-or-or this or that ad infinitum.
It’s a command prompt, I can do anything. That’s the point of it.
Yeah, and although FileMaker can’t make direct native use of it — i.e., there is no Perform vBScript available script step in the menu of script steps — it is possible to assemble vB as a series of temporary records, one text field per line, and export it as a text file with extension “.vbs” and then tell FileMaker to tell the OS to execute it.
But I don’t know diddly about writing vB stuff so I haven’t done more than “proof-of-concept” level tinkering with it yet.
I might end up doing so if I need to boss Word or Excel around for non-Mac users.
I agree - there aren’t many places where nit-pickiness is more appropriate than with computers.
Unless someone puts it there - such as running DOS in a virtual machine, or as an emulation like DOSBox.
No, that’s just selecting windows, moving them, and double-clicking the titlebar.
Another issue is that when things have gone to Hell, you will probably still have access to the command line, even if the GUI has crashed and burned. Command line applications are also easier to write and are much smaller than GUI applications.
<shrug> .bat works just fine with the command line interface. I use it from time to time with no problem.
Windows still uses “bat”. My command line scripts work fine as “bat” files.
On review I see I simulposted RealityChuck except an hour and a half later :o
DOS wasn’t the DOS prompt, although they were inseparable. The DOS prompt was really just the program command.com. When it wasn’t running, other programs were running. Like DIR, which is a program. And COPY which is a program. There were other shells that could easily replace command.com, like, say, early versions of Windows. DOS proper was the operating system, and despite popular perceptions, the human interface != the operating system. However because command.com was so, so, so associated with DOS, it was a simple shorthand just to call it the DOS shell, or even shorter, DOS.
Now with current Windows, DOS is gone completely. But due to history and the association with command.com, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with calling the command line environment DOS. It was made to intentionally operate like the DOS shell. You run the program called DIR and you get a directory listing, just like in DOS. As a user, there’s no difference. There’s no reason for the masses to adopt an arbitrary name because a few, non-technical people confuse DOS (meaning the shell) with DOS (the obsolete OS).
Now if you excuse me, it turns out I have Unix on my computer. As soon as I open “Terminal,” wow!, there I am! I’m in Unix!
‘Open the command line interface.’
‘Huh?’
‘Start - Run - cmd.exe’
‘Oh, the DOS prompt?’
‘Yeah’
That’s got to be tedious when you go through it over and over. Maybe only a minority of non-techie people know it as the DOS prompt. But nobody, surely nobody, knows it only as the command interface or cmd.exe or whatever, and doesn’t understand ‘DOS prompt’.
The tech people aren’t there to correct people’s terminology. They’re there to get things working. That means communicating with people on a level they understand and in a way which avoids confusion. If ‘DOS prompt’ could mean two different things, then you’d have a point. But it doesn’t, so you might as well be complaining that no type is moving when you type 
.
One thing I am happy that Windows Vista finally DID get right is removing pretty much all aspects of DOS that were still left over. All OS’s up through Windows XP, despite not running under a DOS kernel, still used a SETUP program that ran under DOS, and would pull stupid shit like not being able to see a SCSI/PCI hard drive controller and then asking you to put the FLOPPY disk in (nope, it wouldn’t take a CD, it had to be a FLOPPY), and not having even generic mouse drivers working from the start. Remember that ugly blue & grey screen it would use until the first reboot? Vista still has the cmd.com, but you’ll notice that most of the dos commands have been deactivated, and it works simply as an alternative to explorer and the start menu.
It’s amazing that PC architectures are still using an extremely primitive loader in order to find the master boot record. I don’t think it’s been changed in at least 10 years, but with most modern BIOS being able to mount flash drives, external firewire devices and even remote computers via ethernet, it isn’t really much of an issue.
Since we’ve established that it is in fact OK to nitpick in computer threads 
, I will point out that several commands including DIR and COPY were in fact built in to command.com rather than being separate programs.
Ah, yes, internal v. external commands.
I still have a Win98 startup floppy around here somewhere. My 5" disks of DOS 3.3 are long-gone, though.