• Ms Dos Commands Pdf
• All Dos Commands With Example

There are nearly 100 DOS commands available in MS-DOS that are used to communicate with the operating system. Learn more about these commands.

. MS-DOS Command List Tip: See the for a brief description on each of the below commands. Tip: Browse:, and. A B C D E F G H I J None K L M N O None P Q R S T U V W X Y None Z None Recent MS-DOS Forum Posts Subscribe to RSS headline updates from.

This article needs additional citations for. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

(July 2016) This article presents a list of commands used by, especially as used on -based (PCs). Are not part of the scope of this list. In DOS, many standard were provided for common tasks such as listing files on a disk or moving files. Some commands were built into the command interpreter, others existed as external commands on disk. Over the several generations of DOS, commands were added for the additional functions of the operating system. In the current operating system, a text-mode command prompt window, can still be used.

Contents. Command processing The command interpreter for DOS runs when no application programs are running. When an application exits, if the transient portion of the command interpreter in memory was overwritten, DOS will reload it from disk. Some commands are internal — built into COMMAND.COM; others are external commands stored on disk. When the user types a line of text at the operating system command prompt, COMMAND.COM will parse the line and attempt to match a command name to a built-in command or to the name of an executable program file or on disk. If no match is found, an error message is printed, and the command prompt is refreshed.

External commands were too large to keep in the command processor, or were less frequently used. Such utility programs would be stored on disk and loaded just like regular application programs but were distributed with the operating system. Copies of these utility command programs had to be on an accessible disk, either on the current drive or on the command set in the command interpreter. In the list below, commands that can accept more than one file name, or a filename including wildcards (. and?), are said to accept a (file specification) parameter. Commands that can accept only a single file name are said to accept a filename parameter. Additionally, command line switches, or other parameter strings, can be supplied on the command line.

Spaces and symbols such as a '/' or a '-' may be used to allow the command processor to parse the command line into filenames, file specifications, and other options. The command interpreter preserves the case of whatever parameters are passed to commands, but the command names themselves and file names are case-insensitive. Many commands are the same across many DOS systems, but some differ in command syntax or name. DOS commands A partial list of the most common commands for follows below. APPEND Sets the path to be searched for data files or displays the current search path. The APPEND command is similar to the PATH command that tells DOS where to search for program files (files with a.COM,.

EXEC, or.BAT file name extension). Main article: Attrib changes or views the attributes of one or more files. It defaults to displaying the attributes of all files in the current directory. The file attributes available include read-only, archive, system, and hidden attributes. The command has the capability to process whole folders and subfolders of files, BACKUP and RESTORE These are commands to and restore files from an external disk.

These appeared in version 2, and continued to 5 and MS-DOS 6 (PC DOS 7 had a deversioned check). In DOS 6, these were replaced by commercial programs (CPBACKUP, MSBACKUP), which allowed files to be restored to different locations. BASIC and BASICA. Main article: An implementation of the programming language for PCs.

Implementing BASIC in this way was very common in operating systems on 8- and 16-bit machines made in the 1980s. Computers had BASIC 1.1 in ROM, and IBM's versions of BASIC used code in this ROM-BASIC, which allowed for extra memory in the code area.

BASICA last appeared in 5.02, and in (2.0 and later), the version had ROM-BASIC moved into the program code. Microsoft released for machines with no ROM-BASIC. Some OEM releases had basic.com and basica.com as loaders for GW-BASIC.EXE. BASIC was dropped after MS-DOS 4, and PC DOS 5.02. OS/2 (which uses PC DOS 5), has it, while MS-DOS 5 does not. CALL Starts a batch file from within another batch file and returns when that one ends.

CD and CHDIR. Main article: Copies files from one location to another. It is used to make copies of existing files. This command can be used to combine multiple files into target files.

The destination defaults to the current directory. If multiple source files are indicated, the destination must be a directory, or an error will result.

COPY has the ability to concatenate files. The command can copy in text mode or binary mode; in text mode, copy will stop when it reaches the character; in binary mode, the files will be concatenated in their entirety, ignoring EOF characters. Files may be copied to devices. For example, copy file con outputs file to the screen console. Devices themselves may be copied to a destination file, for example, copy con file takes the text typed into the console and puts it into FILE, stopping when (Ctrl+Z) is typed.

CTTY Defines the device (for example, COM1) to use for input and output. DATE Displays the and prompts the user to enter a new date. Complements the command. Main article: Deletes a directory along with all of the files and subdirectories that it contains. Normally, it will ask for confirmation of the potentially dangerous action. We know that the RD(RMDIR) command can not delete a directory if the directory is not empty.

Ms Dos Commands Pdf

DELTREE command can be used to delete the whole directory if the directory is not empty. The deltree command is included in certain versions of and. It is specifically available only in versions of 6.0 and higher, and in. In Windows NT, the functionality provided exists but is handled by the command rd or rmdir which has slightly different syntax.

This command has been deprecated for Windows 7. DELTREE/YDRIVE:PATH DIR. Main article: The DIR command displays the contents of a directory. The contents comprise the disk's volume label and serial number; one directory or filename per line, including the filename extension, the file size in bytes, and the date and time the file was last modified; and the total number of files listed, their cumulative size, and the free space (in bytes) remaining on the disk. The command is one of the few commands that exist from the first versions of DOS.

The command can display files in subdirectories. The resulting directory listing can be sorted by various criteria and filenames can be displayed in a chosen format. Main article: The ECHO command prints its own arguments back out to the DOS equivalent of the (Hence the name, ECHO) Usually, this means directly to the screen, but the output of echo can be redirected, like any other command, to files or devices. Often used in to print text out to the user. Another important use of the echo command is to toggle echoing of commands on and off in batch files. Traditionally batch files begin with the @echo off statement. This says to the interpreter that echoing of commands should be off during the whole execution of the batch file, thus resulting in a 'tidier' output (the @ symbol declares that this particular command (echo off) should also be executed without echo.) EDIT.

Main article: Gives help about DOS commands. MS-DOS help 'command' would give help on a specific command. By itself, it lists the contents of DOSHELP.HLP. MS-DOS 6.xx help command uses to view a quickhelp HELP.HLP file, which contains more extensive information on the commands, with some hyperlinking etc. The MS-DOS 6.22 help system is included on Windows 9x cdrom versions as well.

PC DOS PC DOS 5,6 help is the same form as MS-DOS 5 help command. PC DOS 7.xx help uses view.exe to open OS/2 style.INF files (cmdref.inf, dosrexx.inf and doserror.inf), opening these to the appropriate pages. DR-DOS In DR-DOS, help is a batch file that launches DR-DOS' reference, dosbook.

Microsoft Windows Windows NT, all versions, uses DOS 5 style help, but versions before VISTA have also a Windows help file (NTCMDS.HLP or NTCMDS.INF) in a similar style to MS-DOS 6. Main article: Evaluate the condition, and only if it is true, then it execute the remainder of the command line Otherwise, it skips the remainder of the line and continues with next command line. INTERSVR and INTERLNK In MS-DOS; filelink in DR-DOS. Network PCs using a. The server-side version of InterLnk, it also immobilizes the machine it's running on as it is an active app (As opposed to a app) which must be running for any transfer to take place. DR-DOS' filelink is executed on both the client and server. New in PC DOS 5.02, MS-DOS 6.0 JOIN The JOIN command attaches a drive letter to a specified directory on another drive.

The opposite can be achieved via the command. Main article: Makes a new. The parent of the directory specified will be created if it does not already exist. MEM Displays memory usage. It is capable of displaying program size and status, memory in use, and internal drivers.It is internal command.

MEMMAKER Starting with version 6, MS-DOS included the external program MemMaker which was used to free system memory (especially ) by automatically reconfiguring the and files. This was usually done by moving and to the. The whole process required two system restarts. Before the first restart the user was asked whether he/she wanted to enable, since use of expanded memory required a reserved 64KiB region in upper memory. The first restart inserted the SIZER.EXE program which gauged the memory needed by each TSR or Driver. MemMaker would then calculate the optimal Driver and TSR placement in upper memory and modify the AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS accordingly, and reboot the second time. MEMMAKER.EXE and SIZER.EXE were developed for Microsoft by and were eliminated starting in MS DOS 7 / Windows 95.

PC DOS uses another program RamBoost to optimize memory, working either with PC DOS's / or a third-party memory manager. RamBoost was licensed to IBM. MODE Configures system devices.

Changes graphics modes, adjusts keyboard settings, prepares, and sets up port redirection. Main article: Disk diagnostic utility. Scandisk was a replacement for the chkdsk utility, starting with later versions of MS-DOS. Its primary advantages over chkdsk is that it is more reliable and has the ability to run a surface scan which finds and marks bad clusters on the disk.

It also provided mouse point-and-click, allowing for interactive session to complement command-line batch run. Chkdsk had surface scan and bad cluster detection functionality included, and was used again on Windows NT based operating systems. SET Sets. In Windows NT 2000, 4DOS, 4OS2, 4NT, and a number of third-party solutions allow direct entry of environment variables from the command prompt. From at least Windows 2000, the set command allows for the evaluation of strings into variables, thus providing inter alia a means of performing integer arithmetic.

SETVER SetVer is a program designed to return a different value to the version of DOS that is running. This allows programs that look for a specific version of DOS to run under a different DOS. Setver appeared in version 4, and has been in every version of DOS, OS/2 and Windows NT since. Main article: Display the and waits for the user to enter a new time. Complements the command.

HoursMinSec TITLE Enables a user to change the title of their MS-DOS window. TREE It is an external command, graphically displays the path of each directory and sub-directories on the specified drive. TRUENAME The TRUENAME command will expand the name of a file, directory, or drive, and display the result.

It will expand an abbreviated form which the command processor can recognise into its full form. It can see through SUBST and JOIN to find the actual directory. MS-DOS can find files and directories given their names, without full path information, if the search object is on a path specified by the environment variable.

For example, if PATH includes C: PROGRAMS, and file MYPROG.EXE is on this directory, then if MYPROG is typed at the command prompt, the command processor will execute C: PROGRAMS MYPROG.EXE. In this case, TRUENAME MYPROG would display C: PROGRAMS MYPROG.EXE This command displays the of mapped network or local CD drives. This command is an undocumented DOS command.

The help switch ' /?' Defines it as a 'Reserved command name'.

It is available in MS-DOS 5.00.0. This command is similar to the Unix command, which, given an executable found in $PATH, would give a full path and name. The C library function realpath performs this function. The Microsoft Windows command processors do not support this command. Main article: An internal DOS command, that reports the DOS version presently running, and since MS-DOS 5, whether DOS is loaded high. The corresponding command to report the Windows version is winver.

Values returned:. MS-DOS up to 6.22, typically derive the DOS version from the DOS kernel. This may be different from the string it prints when it starts. PC DOS typically derive the version from an internal string in command.com (so PC DOS 6.1 command.com reports the version as 6.10, although the kernel version is 6.00.).

All Dos Commands With Example

DR-DOS reports whatever value the environment variable OSVER reports. OS/2 command.com reports an internal string, with the OS/2 version.

The underlying kernel here is 5.00, but modified to report x0.xx (where x.xx is the OS/2 version). Windows 9x command.com report a string from inside command.com.

The build version (e.g. 2222), is also derived from there. Windows NT command.com reports either the 32-bit processor string (4nt, cmd), or under some loads, MS-DOS 5.00.500, (for all builds). The underlying kernel reports 5.00 or 5.50 depending on the interrupt.

MS-DOS 5.00 commands run unmodified on NT. The Winver command usually displays a Windows dialog showing the version, with some information derived from the shell.

In windows before Windows for workgroups 3.11, running winver from DOS reported an embedded string in winver.exe. VERIFY Enables or disables the feature to determine if files have been correctly written to disk. If no parameter is provided, the command will display the current setting. Retrieved 10 September 2014.

Retrieved 10 September 2014. ^. DR DOS 6.0 User Guide.

Digital Research. Cooper, Jim (May 2001). Que Publishing.

Retrieved 10 September 2014. Retrieved 10 September 2014. Karp, David Aaron; Tim O'Reilly; Troy Mott (2005). Nutshell handbook (2 ed.). O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Retrieved 2010-11-26. Retrieved 10 September 2014. Retrieved 10 September 2014. External links Wikibooks has a book on the topic of:.: Microsoft TechNet Database 'Command-Line Reference'. contains the official Microsoft MS-DOS 6 command reference documention.

There are several guides to DOS commands available that are licensed under the:. at SourceForge is a specification, written in 1999, for how DOS commands should work in FreeDOS.