Is DOS Dead?

Black Swan

Is it worth learning DOS? I am just beginning to learn something about web authoring, and was told I should study DOS as one of the prerequisites. Useful? Or is DOS dead?

Onikage

Blue_Lagoon wrote:

Is it worth learning DOS? I am just beginning to learn something about web authoring, and was told I should study DOS as one of the prerequisites. Useful? Or is DOS dead?

I could understand learning the UNIX shell, but DOS? I can't imagine why you would be told to learn that, it's pretty much irrelevant to web authoring. Also, Windows has a new and far superior interface called Powershell.

seamus

The DOS Prompt suffered a bit of a death through Windows 95 & 98, but came back into favour with Win2k and XP. From what I've heard, Vista's command shell offers some great functionality.

I can't see the benefit in knowing windows command scripting for web dev though.

I've just downloaded powershell now to take a look, thanks for the pointer Onikage.

mawk

dos will never die.

I will keep it alive in my heart.

monkey tennis

It's not a DOS prompt in 2K and XP...

No idea why a web authoring book would want you to learn DOS... unless it was printed in 1993?

TimTim

I had a telephone interview recently with a company who wanted to know how many primary partitions you could have under dos using fdisk. I thought DOS was dead anyway until then

And you should become comfortable working with a shell from now on. The cut down version of windows server 2008 only has a command prompt to work from.

Black Swan

Will have to checkout Powershell. Thanks guys!

democrates

I'm sure DOS is still useful for network config and diagnostics as well as telnet for accessing remote boxes (and with debug you could write some kick ass batch processes - is that still included?), but if I were you I'd just do a google search for some key useful commands and save it as a handy reference.

That advice really reminds me of the book on MVS my boss gave me when I became a systems analyst, zero use for the work I was doing with JCL, PL/1, Mantis, Fileaid etc. He was an ex sysadmin so from his background it was up there, I scanned it to know what kind of stuff was in it but never once got use from it.

Time spent learning more dos than is required is time denied to the areas you need to focus on, html, css, javascript, and your language of choice be it PHP or whatever, not to mention database design, graphics etc.

jimmycrackcorm

What's to learn?

seamus

You're much better off learning to use the Windows Scripting Host if it's scripting for windows that you need to learn. WSH provides a Unix shell scripting style (totally different languages though) interface to do some pretty powerful administration tasks.