Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/05/15/00:31:04
Greg Phillips <gphillips AT ccboe DOT net> wrote:
>Genuine MS-DOS would be anything up to DOS 6.22.
I'd count MS-DOS 7 (the version included with Win95) as "genuine DOS".
Although it's not sold separately, it can be used by itself without
Windows being present.
>Normally, when you boot a Win95 machine, command.com is loaded, then the
>Win95 shell.
Actually, COMMAND.COM seems to only be loaded if AUTOEXEC.BAT exists.
> A DOS window inside Win95 is command.com running inside
>win.com running on top of the first command.com. Complex, ain't it? :)
WIN.COM isn't Windows (it's basically just a loader program that
bootstraps Windows), so your wording's a bit misleading here (I'd also
replace "inside" with "on top of" for consistency, as long as I'm
being picky :). Also, a "DOS window" may contain a directly run DOS
application, in which case there's usually no secondary copy of
COMMAND.COM involved and, as I mentioned above, there may or may not
be a primary copy loaded before Windows, so it's actually even _more_
complex than you've indicated.
>>2) Do books on the newer MSDOSs apply to DOS under W95 in general?
>
>For the most part. Almost all the commands are still there, updated for
>Win95 so that they can handle long filenames.
Actually, there were a number of DOS utilities that were removed in
DOS 7 (e.g. TREE, HELP), although the Win95 CD-ROM contains the
(non-LFN-aware) DOS 6.22 versions of them if you don't mind a little
delving to find them and a bit of fiddling with SETVER to get them
running.
>config.sys and autoexec.bat are only loaded the first time command.com is
>loaded. They are not reloaded for a DOS window.
CONFIG.SYS is processed before COMMAND.COM is loaded and can in fact
specify an alternate command processor to be loaded in place of
COMMAND.COM. Also, you can make a secondary instance of COMMAND.COM
run AUTOEXEC.BAT if you invoke it with the /P switch (but note that
that switch also prevents you from exiting that secondary copy).
- Raw text -