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Rumors of Cmd's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated (microsoft.com)
Senior Program Manager at Microsoft has responded to speculations that Command Prompt is going away. He writes: The Cmd shell remains an essential part of Windows, and is used daily by millions of businesses, developers, and IT Pro's around the world. In fact:
1. Much of the automated system that builds and tests Windows itself is a collection of many Cmd scripts that have been created over many years, without which we couldn't build Windows itself!
2. Cmd is one of the most frequently run executables on Windows with a similar number of daily launches as File Explorer, Edge and Internet Explorer!
3. Many of our customers and partners are totally dependent on Cmd, and all its quirks, for their companies" existence!
In short: Cmd is an absolutely vital feature of Windows and, until there's almost nobody running Cmd scripts or tools, Cmd will remain within Windows.
1. Much of the automated system that builds and tests Windows itself is a collection of many Cmd scripts that have been created over many years, without which we couldn't build Windows itself!
2. Cmd is one of the most frequently run executables on Windows with a similar number of daily launches as File Explorer, Edge and Internet Explorer!
3. Many of our customers and partners are totally dependent on Cmd, and all its quirks, for their companies" existence!
In short: Cmd is an absolutely vital feature of Windows and, until there's almost nobody running Cmd scripts or tools, Cmd will remain within Windows.
I'm glad! CMD is critical in our company, too.
MS actually does a really good job supporting things for a long time. Some other responses, I'd imagine...
Apple: We're brave enough to stop supporting any version of CMD that came out before this year.
Google: We killed it. Too bad.If you don't buy our ads, then we don't really care about how you use our software.
I don't respond to AC's.
2. Cmd is one of the most frequently run executables on Windows with a similar number of daily launches as File Explorer, Edge and Internet Explorer!
The only way they could know that is if they're spying on everyone who uses Windows.
Am I wrong? Is there some other, totally consensual and benign way that they could know this?
When it was originally posted, there was no link. I'm not the only person here to state so.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
2. Cmd is one of the most frequently run executables on Windows with a similar number of daily launches as File Explorer, Edge and Internet Explorer!
How do they know that? Polls have been made? Oh, wait. Telemetry.
Microsoft makes virtually all of their software revenue from enterprise sales. And killing a legacy tool as widely-used as CMD will piss them off.
So while I believe Microsoft will not hesitate to give home users the middle finger, I seriously doubt they will kill CMD any time soon.
Everything new is in PowerShell, but we have a lot of old crud that runs in CMD because no one wants to break it.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
It took Microsoft a decade and a half to produce a proper shell for Windows NT/Win32. In that time they seemed to try everything else but a shell; VBscript/Jscript, WMI objects, registry commands, but at every iteration they were told "Look at the Bourne shells, for chrissakes, that's what we want!" The deep fear and hatred of all things *nix at Microsoft inevitably lead them to just implement half-ass solutions. Even Powershell is an overly verbose and frankly rather slow shell, but at least it allows for automation of most aspects of the Windows server.
What it really boils down to me is that Microsoft never really understood, nor did they ever really want to understand how sysadmins used and manipulated servers. Windows carried on the long-standing DOS tradition of pushing in their own direction regardless of what made sense or what the rest of the industry was doing; a willful exercise in refusing to accept long-standing principles of system administration. Everything about Windows administration always made me feel like I was using some idiot's half-ass attempt at remaking Unix, so that you could go to a point, but never beyond that. For years there was a whole industry built on filling in the holes in COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I think that's because Windows just isn't a command-line culture at heart like *nix. I think instead it's more of a GUI/Application culture, which makes sense, if you think about it, as the focus was on visual applications from the start. As such, a typical Windows developer thinks about embedded scripts inside an application to automate things, and using OLE to inter-operate with other programs or data. *nix developers pass data (often text) from small, focused utility to small focused utility, typically with Bash or another shell as the glue, because it's legacy came from text-only environments with a powerful shell. It's just two different ways of thinking about solving problems, but server administrative problems and application solutions are not necessarily equivalent, as you indicated.
I'd also posit that this is one reason why *nix tends to do well in server spaces, since working remotely is comfortable even through a simple terminal, and why Windows does well on the desktop, since most users are more comfortable with graphical interfaces than a command-line. That's not the only reason, of course, but I think it contributes.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.