Another vestigial part of Windows gets deprecated

Damen y Messieurs: can we say a rather nice eulogy for Ye Olde Windows CMD Shell?

While sad, for CMD has been an integral part of Windows since Windows 1.0, IIRC.

It has served us well.

Form the days of the old autoexec.bat batch, config.sys, files, TSRs, and all other quick-and-dirty uses for it, the windows command shell has served us well.

Since the move to GUI Windows, it has worked very well in the background, and always ready when needed.

Early this week, Windows Shepherdess Dana Sakar revealed that going forward, the default CLI shell in Windows will be PowerShell

To simply describe PowerShell as “the Windows command line on steroids” is to gravely misunderstand both the product, and the immense capabilities it delivers to both users and system administrators.

A brief explanation of PowerShell is on this Wikipedia page, and the official Microsoft PowerShell page is here.

Rather understandably, several of the yum-yums masquerading as tech media these days have completely misread Dana’s words, and completely misconstrued her statement to mean that CMD will vanish from Windows in the next – Redstone 2 – release.

That is simply not true.

The bottom line is this:

Windows ‘Redstone 2’ will come with PowerShell as the default shell. But CMD will also ship with the OS.

However, though the old CMD will be invisible, so to speak, it remains a part of Windows, and is available to anyone who wants it. Additionally, it can be set as the default shell, if that’s a user’s choice.

But, why would you?

Please learn, and use PowerShell.

It will serve you better.

Fortuitously, Windows expert and technology journalist Jonathan Hassell has a fantastic tutorial, <PowerShell> for Total Beginners. He is also offering a free 4-day crash course for beginners, available here. I highly recommend it.

Here lies Windows CMD
It served us well.

© 2002 – 2016, John Obeto for Blackground Media Unlimited

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