Unix vs DOS

creeping death · #1 2nd May 2009, 08:05 AM

I know that unix commands and shell-scripts are very smart...a single command allows a user to do a task that would probably require him to open 5 windows and click 50 times in any GUI environment...

what i m curious about is how smart is(was) MS-DOS...does DOS have the capability to make ingenious pipes and brilliant scripts...

my experience with Linux(UNIX) commands is most fulfilling mostly because of the inventiveness of Unix commands...a very complicated task can be performed by the collaboration of commands that perform rather trivial tasks individually...

So my question is are MS-DOS commands and utilities as smart as UNIX?

stevea · #2 2nd May 2009, 11:23 AM

No. The DOS CLI was very basic. If you've ever seen the dos prompt on older Win systems you have a good idea. It had the concept of file.extension built in and permitted a crummy version of wildcards '*'. No regular expressions, Yes a form of shell varaibles but no good way to manipulate the strings or execute them.

No pipes but some very clever scripting could use intermediate files.

FWIW CP/M had a very similar but IMO better CLI.

***glennzo*** · #3 2nd May 2009, 11:27 AM

Good old batch files. Haven't written one of them in years

creeping death · #4 2nd May 2009, 11:52 AM

i thought so too...DOS commands arnt as flexible as UNIX commands...which brings me to my actual question that i meant to ask...

UNIX was re-written in C in 1974...and DOS family of OS came in the late 1970s/early 80s ... so why was DOS even allowed to dominate the microcomputer market when UNIX was so much better and when they had so many versions of Unix available back then?

stefan1975 · #5 2nd May 2009, 12:16 PM

well in all truth microsoft powershell (2) is pretty nifty as well, it is DOS evolved and then some ... one might even think that it is at least as good (dare i say better?) then bash ..... in a windows environment of course....

pete_1967 · #6 2nd May 2009, 12:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by creeping death

... so why was DOS even allowed to dominate the microcomputer market when UNIX was so much better and when they had so many versions of Unix available back then?

Because IBM chose DOS as operating system for the PC.

creeping death · #7 2nd May 2009, 01:15 PM

yeah but why did ibm choose that...what factors made them make that choice?

@stefan_1967 how are powershell utilities better than UNIX utilities? anyways powershell was released in 2006...unix is much more mature...though cryptic
and moreover the powershell dev team themselves declare that their main focus was not to develop a CLI but an automation tool...http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/arc...d-wpf-wtf.aspx

and if UNIX was better than DOS, then why was the microcomputer line of OS allowed devolved instead of allowing it to flourish and evolve with UNIX?

scottro · #8 2nd May 2009, 02:49 PM

Why? Well, Bill Gates had a business background and probably did a better job of marketing. There's histories all over the web, I'd do a bit of a search, trying to avoid the knne-jerk pro or anti-MS viewpoints.

What people do forget is that one reason Windows reached its position of dominance, before it was in a position to use its power, was because they were more intelligent about marketing than many others.

If Unix was (I'm pulling these numbers out of the air, I have no memory of what the prices were then) $10,000 and DOS was $500, there was obviously more room for profit with DOS.

Keep in mind that back then, Unix was extremely expensive.

aleph · #9 2nd May 2009, 03:08 PM

Unix was designed with modularity in mind. The shell was designed to be some kind of "glue" that could make various specific programs work together. On the other hand the DOS command interpreter heavily relied on built-in functions of the command interpreter.

Simple Unix paradigms such as pipelining and filters was absent in DOS because DOS didn't support multitasking or concurrency. On Unix you can open a pipe connecting two processes together but on DOS you couldn't have two processes working concurrently at the same time.

sonoran · #10 2nd May 2009, 03:09 PM

I don't think the original IBM PC was capable of running Unix. I haven't checked this, but I believe Unix always required multitasking and networking, which is why it was on Vaxes and university networks.

Wasn't that Linus' idea - a version of Unix he could run at home?

You beat me by a minute there, Aleph - always knew I should have learned to touchtype