DOS was primitive but the things you mentioned worked, even if they were a simulation. The end user was unaware, unless they needed real OS capabilites. In which case, why were they using DOS?
Cmd has a lot of improvements most people are not aware of because they were off by default. Still they refused to do further improvement necessary to make it very useful. There is a 3rd party shell called 4NT that is/was a compatible and very powerful replacement.
The thing about DOS's globbing is that it wasn't DOS that was doing the globbing, but executables. And they'd do it inconsistently. The executables were also aware if they were passed, say, a '*', and might change their behavior as a consequence (I'm trying to remember whether or not this was actually been the case, can't say, it's been too many years).
Which doesn't happen in any Bourne-compliant shell, as it's the shell which expands the wildcard, not the app (an unexpanded or escaped wildcard character can of course be passed to an executable).
True. I remember someone here complaining about that just the other day, said it was a bad idea, but I can't remember why. I prefer the shell doing it.
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Yep, NIH.
DOS was primitive but the things you mentioned worked, even if they were a simulation. The end user was unaware, unless they needed real OS capabilites. In which case, why were they using DOS?
Cmd has a lot of improvements most people are not aware of because they were off by default. Still they refused to do further improvement necessary to make it very useful. There is a 3rd party shell called 4NT that is/was a compatible and very powerful replacement.
The thing about DOS's globbing is that it wasn't DOS that was doing the globbing, but executables. And they'd do it inconsistently. The executables were also aware if they were passed, say, a '*', and might change their behavior as a consequence (I'm trying to remember whether or not this was actually been the case, can't say, it's been too many years).
Which doesn't happen in any Bourne-compliant shell, as it's the shell which expands the wildcard, not the app (an unexpanded or escaped wildcard character can of course be passed to an executable).
True. I remember someone here complaining about that just the other day, said it was a bad idea, but I can't remember why. I prefer the shell doing it.