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In computing, start is a command of the IBM OS/2, [1] Microsoft Windows [2] and ReactOS [3] command-line interpreter cmd.exe [4] (and some versions of COMMAND.COM) to start programs or batch files or to open files or directories using the default program. start is not available as a standalone program. The underlying Win32 API is ShellExecute.
Changes made to the command line environment after SetLocal commands are local to the batch file. EndLocal command restores the previous settings. [17] The Call command allows subroutines within batch file. The Call command in COMMAND.COM only supports calling external batch files. File name parser extensions to the Set command are comparable ...
The console alternatives 4DOS, 4OS2, FreeDOS, Peter Norton's NDOS and 4NT / Take Command which add functionality to the Windows NT-style cmd.exe, MS-DOS/Windows 95 batch files (run by Command.com), OS/2's cmd.exe, and 4NT respectively are similar to the shells that they enhance and are more integrated with the Windows Script Host, which comes ...
Command-line interpreters allow users to issue various commands in a very efficient (and often terse) way. This requires the user to know the names of the commands and their parameters, and the syntax of the language that is interpreted. The Unix #! mechanism and OS/2 EXTPROC command facilitate the passing of batch files to external processors ...
Microsoft released a version of cmd.exe for Windows 9x and ME called WIN95CMD to allow users of older versions of Windows to use certain cmd.exe-style batch files. As of Windows 8, cmd.exe is the normal command interpreter for batch files; the older COMMAND.COM can be run as well in 32-bit versions of Windows able to run 16-bit programs.
A CMD file has a 128-byte header, followed by 1–8 groups of code or data. [2] Each group can be up to 1 megabyte in size. In later versions of the format, CMD files can also contain relocation information and Resident System Extensions (RSXs). [2] The start of the header lists the groups present in the file, and their types.
The user then presses Return or ↵ Enter to run the command or open the file. Command-line completion is useful in several ways, as illustrated by the animation accompanying this article. Commonly accessed commands, especially ones with long names, require fewer keystrokes to reach.
This was a plain text file with simple key–value pairs (e.g. DEVICEHIGH=C:\\DOS\\ANSI.SYS) until MS-DOS 6, which introduced an INI-file style format. There was also a standard plain text batch file named AUTOEXEC.BAT that ran a series of commands on boot. Both these files were retained up to Windows 98SE, which still ran on top of MS-DOS.