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It did, and also up till 3.0 (thus 2.10 and 2.11) had also SWITCHAR which you could change command options character / to - like in it was in UNIX convention, from CONFIG.SYS definition.

The problem with changing / to - was, that under MS-DOS command line parsing was left completely to a a loaded program, which then would had to know how to find out this change and act accordingly. And if not only MS-DOS std. utilities behaved properly and others not so much. Thus causing confusion which perhaps then lead to dropping that feature 3.0 onwards.

I think it was also before 2.0 or at least what delivered with Apricot PC (UK made PC) 1.25 which I tinkered with few days as we had it on display from Finnish importer ARAIC Rautakirja Oy (Finnish railways VR magazines and other related travel reading importer, also keeper of the R-kiosks). A very nicely built non IBM PC compatible PC with good graphics and then uncommon 3.5" 70kb disk drives before Apple Macintosh made the more popular.

https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/en/collectie/act-computers...

e: Now did it change also path separator from \ to / ? It may have done it also. I bit later work more with Xenix and can't remember for sure. Starting from 286 versions SvR2.x, 386 SvR3.x up till SCO UNIX SVR4 early 90's and less with MS-DOS besides maintaining couple of TSR's I had written and just checked every MS-DOS release that those still did work.

by mesrik3 hours ago|

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Oh my, I'm sorry how many typos I made and forgot to fix.

s/ARAIC/AFAIC/g s/70kb/720kB/g

by akdor11542 hours ago|

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> under MS-DOS command line parsing was left completely to a a loaded program

And in the many decades and OS rewrites since, they have long since corrected this mistake... right?

by mesrik2 hours ago|

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I think I did have some time early -90's someone did alternative C0.lib which actually when you linked it with your programs it made much easier porting some *nix software to MS-DOS. No need to make modifications command line handler, as that modified startup-library as I think it's or was called, did what was needed.

It was then COMMAND.COM ie. Dos command line did not do that. And there were alternatives like something called 4DOS which I did never use, but those could have done it. Or did they?

I have't used Windows for quite long time. And I do not know if CMD.EXE or PowerShell whatever its name are any better. Maybe someone knowing would like to comment this.

by contextfree40 minutes ago|

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This isn't so much a cmd thing as a fundamental Windows API thing. CreateProcess takes in the entire command line as a single string.

Powershell is a completely different model where native commands run in-process, you can import commands and invoke APIs from arbitrary .NET assemblies, and then the PS runtime handles all argument parsing (and many other things). But it also lets you invoke and interop with arbitrary command-line executables and then those do their own parsing like they always have.

by seritools54 minutes ago|

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no, Windows still leaves that to the program. Usually handled by the msvc runtime for argv/argc, but the base windows API is GetCommandLine, giving you a single string.

EDIT: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2022/02/18/

by autoexec4 hours ago|

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Thankfully they ditched it. One of the best things about DOS was that it gave users control over the directory structure. While other OS's just barfed a billions directories all over your disk on install and spewed system files wherever they felt like it, DOS let you decide where you wanted things with the exception of a couple of files in the root directory. This did mean that some people just dumped everything into the root of their system drive, but everyone else could organize things however they wanted. You could learn a lot about someone, and their system, with a single dir command.

by rasz4 hours ago|

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>gave users control over the directory structure

try making an AUX directory, or CON file, or PRN

by somat10 hours ago|

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A lot of early dos development was trying to see how many unix concepts they could fit, directories, pipes, environment, devices.

by mesrik5 hours ago|

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And file handles stdin, stdout, stderr same file numbers also. There was and still is overlapping features with Microsoft later and current operating systems.

Linked post is quite good and had forgotten completely XEDOS mentioned Byte article.