30+ Reasons Why You Should Say MsDog and not MsDos.

Note: I have tried to be fair here by not mentioning design choices that are simply different from what others have done. Therefore I don't have an entry just for using a slash and not a dash as switch char. That is mostly a matter of what you like.

The default shell as mentioned in a lot of the items below is "Command.com". You will notice that a lot of the blame falls on it.

Ok, here we go -- start counting...

File System
1. The file system's limit of 8+3 characters stinks.
2. The execution time for a seek in a file is proportional to the offset seeked to. Seeks in a directory are also proportional to the number of files in the directory.
3. Some file names like huge.filename are silently truncated to the 8+3 limit while others like lots.of.dots or .emacs simply are illegal. (Actually, .emacs is only illegal in some versions of MsDog, I believe.)
4. You can corrupt the file system with system calls with perfectly valid (and reasonable) arguments.
5. The read-only bits for directories are never used.
6. You can rename files but not directories.
7. The file system is limited to approximately 2^16 allocation units. This means that as disks become larger, so do the allocation units and the amount of disk space that cannot be used.
   Kernel

8. Command lines cannot be longer than 126 characters. This makes it more fun to port utilities that execute other programs. As an example take a look at Gnu Make.
9. Pipes, foo|bar, are implemented by >tempfile and <tempfile.
10. MsDog is not reentrant, nor is it protected against attempts of reentrance.
11. You can open a file like c:\foo\..\config.sys even if you don't have a foo directory.
12. Text file read routines recognize a special character (0x1A) as a magic cookie that causes all further data to be ignored. A corrupted byte can cause part of a file to be lost without warning.
13. When writing to files in text mode, bytes 0x1A are simply ignored.
14. The end of a text line is represented by two characters (CR/LF). This is actually ok (just a design choice from way back), but it would be a lot better if the utilities did something useful on files containing only LFs.
    Shell

15. Redirection doesn't work with batch files.
16. Redirection doesn't work with the "For" command.
17. You cannot redirect stderr with the default shell.
18. The default shell doesn't pass a child process' return code on to its caller. The internal commands don't return an error code.
19. The default shell disregards case of environment variables while the rest of MsDog doesn't. Also it doesn't allow setting an empty environment variable.
20. Executablility is based on file names, not on file attributes. Actually, this is only really true for "Command" because any file is considered executable by the MsDog kernel. It is, however, known to be rather unsafe just to execute an arbitrary file as a series of machine instructions.
21. You can only expand environment variables from batch files, not from the command line.
22. Almost every version of MsDog has its own little perculiarities with parsing of commands. When, e.g., was the @-prefix convention introduced? Which versions allow you to echo a greater-than-sign?
23. You cannot escape the special characters of the shell. In newer versions you can put them inside double quotes, but -- guess what -- the quotes are passed as part of the argument.
24. Batch programs can take more than nine parameters, but you cannot refer to the tenth before you give up access to the first (et cetera).
25. You cannot pass certain characters (like "=") as part of the command line to batch programs.
26. Not all versions of MsDog can echo an empty line with the built-in "Echo" command.
27. Running a batch file from a batch file means exec-ing it by default, so the rest of the first batch file is never seen. This actually means that you cannot use batch files as wrappers if you want to fix some behaviour.
28. The default shell doesn't even think of exiting when end-of-file is encountered on standard input. That this hangs the system doesn't seem to bother anyone.
29. The "Copy" command in the default shell will not copy a zero-length file -- but it will still delete a file of that name in the destination directory.
30. The remainder of a "Rem" statement is not completely ignored. Rem > foo will create a zero-length file.
31. Unlike any other text file output routine, redirection of console output with append (e.g., Dir >>foo) will not overwrite a 0x1A character if it is at the end of the original file; instead it will just append the new data behind it. This will cause all appended data (from this or any subsequent program) to be lost.
    Utilities

32. Most MsDog commands refuse to understand -s as an option specifier while others like "Move" always accept it -- undocumentedly, of course.
33. Silly limits are all over the place: "Sort" refuses to sort more than 64K; if "Fc" doesn't find differences early enough then it invents some; the shell can only set PATH to strings less than 128 characters; file commands like "Del" can only work on one file specification.
34. At least five different programs for packing executables have been used for the lastest version of MsDog. The packers make it a little bit more difficult to patch binaries. Just a little.
35. The "Debug" program has not been updated to understand the instructions of the 186, 286, 386, 486, Pentium, 287, and 187/387 processors. For some versions of debug add 8087 to this list.
36. Utilities like "sed" are not provided with MsDog so you cannot rely on users having them. You cannot rely on, say, "Edlin" either because not all MsDog versions have that either. The problem is that you simply cannot send you users a script file because they lack a common interpreter.
37. Many utilites from MsDog check that they run under the version of MsDog that they were compiled for, even if they use only documented features and would work perfectly well with any version of MsDog since 2.0. I can understand this for low-level software like "Format", but it is really stupid for "Backup" and "Restore".
38. Files created by "Backup" can usually only be read by the corresponding version of "Restore", making backups useless when trying to go to a different version of MsDog (or possibly even a different machine).

Bonus reason regarding PcDog, IBM's own version of MsDog

1. Some versions of PcDog have been known to explicitly check that the harddisks in the system are prepared with PcDog and not MsDog. If not, then the harddisks are simply ignored.