From: 71231 DOT 104 AT compuserve DOT com (Richard Slobod) Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: Looking for help with MSDOS AUTOEXEC & CONFIG Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 03:21:39 GMT Organization: Warwick Online Lines: 45 Message-ID: <355bad78.48693868@news.warwick.net> References: <199805141530 DOT LAA00034 AT mailhost DOT ccboe DOT net> NNTP-Posting-Host: m973-48.warwick.net To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Precedence: bulk Greg Phillips 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).