Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
> FWIW, the fact that you're (still) talking about .bat files (which
> mostly continue to exist for backwards compatibility with -- here it
> comes -- MS-DOS :) might suggest that more than a decade in Windows
> shell development went by you without leaving a trace. cmd.exe is not
> bash, but IME it can do much more than most of its bashers seem to
> know.

I guess I'm missing something.  Yes CMD.EXE is a lot more capable than
COMMAND.COM, the DOS command line processor.  However, files for CMD are
still named .BAT as far as I know.  Is there some different suffix that
turns on more extended features by default?

I agree CMD has a lot more hidden features than most people seem to be aware
of.  However, I've used several different command shells and consider CMD to
be the worst of the bunch.  I think the syntax for doing some things is
unnecessarily squirrely.  For example, while it is possible to get the
output of a program into a shell variable, this is neither intuitive nor is
the syntax clear and easy to remember.

Then there is the problem of very poorly handled "delayed environment
variable expansion".  This can be enabled on the CMD command line, but as
far as I know a script can't enable it inside.  That means you can't rely on
it being on or off in a script a customer might run because you don't
control the CMD invocation.  You could have your script run a second CMD
invocation with the switch explicitly set, but that makes the shell scripts
that rely on that very messy.

The hard limit of 9 command line arguments to shell scripts is another
limitation.

In the end you can get done what you need with CMD.  If you're doing
anything advanced though, it's usually not as nice and simple as with other
command shells.


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