In CP/M-86, Concurrent CP/M-86, Personal CP/M-86, S5-DOS, DOS Plus, Concurrent DOS, FlexOS, Multiuser DOS, System Manager and REAL/32 as well as by SCP1700, [1] CP/K [1] and K8918-OS, [1] CMD is the filename extension used by CP/M-style executable programs. It corresponds to COM in CP/M-80 and EXE in DOS. The same extension is used by the command-line interpreter CMD.EXE in OS/2 and Windows for batch files.
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. Each type can be used at most once. They are:
The first 256 bytes of the data group must be zero. They will be populated by CP/M-86 with the zero page (comparable to the Program Segment Prefix in DOS). If there is no data group, then the first 256 bytes of the code group will be used instead. [3]
Under OS/2 and Windows NT, the .CMD file extension is associated with batch scripts for their command processor CMD.EXE. Since binary code will not be executed this way, attempting to run CP/M-86 CMD files under the CMD command processor will not work, but typically only cause mild inconvenience to users. The executable loader and relocator in CP/M-86 and related operating systems can test the first byte in the file, which happens to be the type byte of the first table entry in a CP/M CMD file, to have a value of 1 to 9 before accepting it as a valid CP/M CMD file. [2] ASCII values smaller than 10 are rarely or never used in batch scripts, so that this scheme gives reasonably good protection.
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COMMAND.COM is the default command-line interpreter for MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me. In the case of DOS, it is the default user interface as well. It has an additional role as the usual first program run after boot. As a shell, COMMAND.COM has two distinct modes of operation: interactive mode and batch mode. Internal commands are commands stored directly inside the COMMAND.COM binary; thus, they are always available, but can only be executed directly from the command interpreter.
4DOS is a command-line interpreter by JP Software, designed to replace the default command interpreter COMMAND.COM
in Microsoft DOS and Windows. It was written by Rex C. Conn and Tom Rawson and first released in 1989. Compared to the default, it has a large number of enhancements.
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A COM file is a type of simple executable file. On the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX operating systems of the 1970s, .COM
was used as a filename extension for text files containing commands to be issued to the operating system. With the introduction of Digital Research's CP/M, the type of files commonly associated with COM extension changed to that of executable files. This convention was later carried over to DOS. Even when complemented by the more general EXE file format for executables, the compact COM files remained viable and frequently used under DOS.
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In computer data, a substitute character (␚) is a control character that is used to pad transmitted data in order to send it in blocks of fixed size, or to stand in place of a character that is recognized to be invalid, erroneous or unrepresentable on a given device. It is also used as an escape sequence in some programming languages.
The line-oriented debugger DEBUG.EXE
is an external command in operating systems such as DOS, OS/2 and Windows.
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Hunk is the executable file format of tools and programs of the Amiga Operating System based on Motorola 68000 CPU and other processors of the same family. The file format was originally defined by MetaComCo. as part of TRIPOS, which formed the basis for AmigaDOS. This kind of executable got its name from the fact that the software programmed on Amiga is divided in its internal structure into many pieces called hunks, in which every portion could contain either code or data.
A batch file is a script file in DOS, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows. It consists of a series of commands to be executed by the command-line interpreter, stored in a plain text file. A batch file may contain any command the interpreter accepts interactively and use constructs that enable conditional branching and looping within the batch file, such as IF
, FOR
, and GOTO
labels. The term "batch" is from batch processing, meaning "non-interactive execution", though a batch file might not process a batch of multiple data.
A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free.
A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with a computer program by inputting lines of text called command-lines. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user-friendly alternative to the non-interactive interface available with punched cards.
CMD file may refer to: