| rdfs:comment | - A partial list of the most common commands for DOS follows. In versions 5 of DOS and later, the user can get help by typing help at the shell prompt. To get help on a DOS command, the command-line switch /? can be used. For example, to get help for the xcopy command, type the following at the DOS prompt: xcopy /? The operating system will execute the command and the /? parameter instructs the command to display a help page about itself, in this case xcopy. To view this help page, see the xcopy entry on this page.
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| abstract | - A partial list of the most common commands for DOS follows. In versions 5 of DOS and later, the user can get help by typing help at the shell prompt. To get help on a DOS command, the command-line switch /? can be used. For example, to get help for the xcopy command, type the following at the DOS prompt: xcopy /? The operating system will execute the command and the /? parameter instructs the command to display a help page about itself, in this case xcopy. To view this help page, see the xcopy entry on this page. In the list below, when a command can accept more than one filename, or a filename including wildcards (* and ?), it is said to accept a filespec parameter. Commands that can accept only a single filename are said to accept a filename parameter. For most of the commands, the Unix equivalent is given. It should be noted that Unix commands typically provide ranges of functionality and flexibility that are not approached by the equivalent DOS command, so all comparisons are approximate. For example, the DOS commands copy and xcopy are said to be equivalent to the Unix cp command, but in reality cp has much greater power than copy, and a similar functionality to xcopy. While many commands are the same across many DOS systems MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS, FreeDOS, etc.) some differ in command syntax or name. In DOS commands, unlike Unix, lower-case and capital letters are equivalent. It is usual for parameters or arguments also to be independent of case. Sometimes a hyphen ("-") may be used instead of a slash ("/"). Commands which are not part of the operating system may follow the same conventions, but this is not necessarily the case. When using a command whose syntax is not known it can be convenient to type the command with no arguments, and with "/?", "-?", "/h", "-h" and even "/help", in the expectation that one of these will display brief information.
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