What's the difference between COMMAND.COM and CMD.EXE?

Read the article that everyone's commenting on.
Subscribe to the RSS Feed for comments on this article.

For the past 2 hours I am trying to access 'my documents' with the command prompt and was frustatingly reaching nowhere. You cleared it within one minute :)........You are great, thanks a million :D

I have a friend that is getting a command.com type error approximately 1 minute after bootup, while sitting at the desktop . error is: c:\windows\system32\configuration\command.com Parameter not correct c:\document
Obviously cannot find the "documents and settings" folder. What would cause command.com to start up and be giving this error. It is a WinXP system. Leo, can you or anyone else explain this to me?

that's cuz some shortcut is pointing to 'documents and settings' trough command.exe, try to find the shortcut file, then edit it and change the name to docume~1 or whatever it is.

what is the difference between directory and command

Thanks Nice explaination

One thing you do NOT get "off the shelf" with 'cmd.exe' is the 'history' though'. 'command.com' just keeps on going, going, going.

With 'cmd.exe' you have to tweak it to see, not what you typed, but what the output was. If you start a program or a batch job which results in thousands of lines of feedback.... initially you will have a problem with cmd.exe. NOT with command.com.

'command.com' does it good-old-style DOS ways.... it just keeps on going. IOW you can just scroll back and back and back. No fancy-pancy true-type fonts though.

I didn't try it, but I guess that if you exeed the 64kB segment command.com will submit to failure.

command.com doesn't maintain a history of the commands run previously (in the same session of course!) , whereas cmd.exe maintains a relly long (configurable) history

Wow, thanks much for the tech note. Gets very frustrating when you know something is supposed to work, but it does not and you can quickly search and find a fast solution. Wish all of computer life were this easy :) ~SL

if i open cmd.exe is it still possible to get
cd progra~1

Directory of C:\PROGRA~1
is this possible in cmd.exe ?

To post a comment on "What's the difference between COMMAND.COM and CMD.EXE?", please return to that article's main page.