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What is a DOS Shell?

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8 replies

by jardinier

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Please don't laugh. I have encountered this term innumerable times, but haven't a clue what it means. Despite my ignorance I have successfully built or refurbished many computers, and installed, operated and trouble-shot various version of Windows. Simple answers please.

8 replies

by cactus pete

It's that DOS window you go to when you're in Windows, and go to START/RUN then type CMD or COMMAND. The 'shell' is the environment.

by generalist

If you go far enough back, DOSSHELL was a nice little program that gave you some fairly sophisticated menu capabilities and file access capabilities before Windows came around.

It was one set up from command line entries and home grown menus. But it was easy to use and easy to understand.

Then Windows and the icon crazy GUI came along.

by thamer

Simply, ... MS-DOS Shell is a graphical interface to MS-DOS.

The shell is basically the prompt at which you can type in your commands. For example you can type:

C:\ dir

This basically asks the DOS shell to "print to your screen" a copy of the directory of the C drive.

When Windows runs a DOS shell it uses configuration parameters from 1) your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files, and 2)the parameters set up from Windows.

by djent

The common use of the term nowdays refers to an emulated 16 bit enviroment running as a seperate process. The purpose is to accomadate 16 bit applications in windows. This moderately successful, many DOS apps make direct hardware calls that windows wont allow, this may or may not crash windows.

by been there

Its a graphical interface that is a type of file manager and was originally used in Win 3.X at the dos prompt.

by sgt_shultz

it runs another os 'environment' in a separate process from the main one (eg your windows xp os). i think of it as emulation, perhaps that is not accurate.
i notice they keep referring to the 'shell command' in the mskb but i don't know of any such thing. if you choose Start/Run and type cmd you are using 32bit windows xp command shell. if you type 'command' you are using 16 bit dos shell.
i found this to be a really good question. it's posts like yours that keep me here. thank you. does this answer it any?

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