Do You Really Want a Rodent to Run Your Computer?

Computers have changed in a lot of ways in the last decade. It's reasonable to believe that they will continue to change in the future. As much as the hardware has changed, the operating systems have changed even more. The command line interface or CLI, the normal way of issuing commands to a computer is being replaced with a Graphical User Interface or GUI, where a mouse is used to issue comands. Below I have made a table comparing a few of the more common CLI commands used in three of the most popular command line operating systems.

Frequently Used Commands in Common OS's

DOS	UNIX	VMS	Function
xcopy	cp	copy	copies a file
del	rm	del	deletes a file
cd	cd	set def	changes current directory
move	mv	no similar command	moves a file from one place to another
ren	mv	ren	change the name of a file
md	mkdir	create /dir	make a new directory
edit (or edlin or copy con)	vi	edit or eeve	create a new text file
attrib	chmod	set prot	modify file attributes
type	more	type	display the contents of a file

As you can see from the partial list of commands in the table above, many of the commands are similar. Since UNIX and VMS are multiuser OS's, they give many options that DOS does not, such as "mail" commands and "password" commands. DOS does not have those capabilities, since it was designed to be a personal computer operating system although there are ways to configure a DOS computer to perform those functions as well. Since most of today's computer users run Windows, I will try to relate the functions of the two command line operating systems I use most (DOS and Linux) to be understandable to Windows users. I hope that some readres of these pages will take some time to explore these interfaces, and maybe give some serious consideration to Linux as an alternative to Windows on their PC's. For those not yet willing to make this move, maybe they can use DOS to enhance their Windows computing experience.

What many Windows users don't realize is that most versions of Windows, actually all versions of Windows other than WinNT, Win2K, and WinXP, are really just GUI's sitting on top of DOS. DOS is doing all the real work. Also, even those versions of Windows which are not DOS based do offer the option of a command line, a DOS shell, to give users the option of an efficient interface with their computer.

I've designed this web page to provide support (and maybe a little propaganda) for the two command line interfaces that I use. In both cases, there are GUI's available which may serve many useful purposes. But in general it is my belief that the command line is the most efficient and logical way to operate your computer. If your interest is in Linux, please follow the link to my Linux pages. If you're a DOS/Windows user, you have my condolences, but feel free to follow the link to my DOS pages.

My Linux pages

Click to view my DOS or my Linux pages

My DOS pages