cmd Getting started with cmd Features
Example
Microsoft Command Prompt is a command-line interpreter (CLI) for the Windows operating systems.
A CLI is program intended primarily to read operating system instructions typed on a keyboard by the user. It is therefore addressed also as a command-line interface, to contrast it with graphical interfaces.
As these interfaces (whether textual or graphical) shield the user from directly accessing to the operating system kernel, they are also said shells.
Given the name of the Command Prompt executable file, cmd.exe, the Command Prompt is friendly named cmd.
Given its OS piloting role, it is also said the console.
Like other shells, cmd can read batch of instructions from a file. In this case the cmd shell acts as a language interpreter and the file content can be regarded as an actual program. When executing these batch programs, there is no intermediate compilation phase. They are typically read, interpreted and executed line by line. Since there is no compilation, there is no production of a separated executable file. For this reason the programs are denoted batch scripts or shell scripts.
Note that the instructions entered interactively might have a slightly different syntax from those submitted as a script, but the general principle is that what can be entered from the command line can be also put in a file for later reuse.
