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Description
DOS is a family of operating systems designed for legacy computers, and documenting it may help some modern-day DOS users, e.g. DOSBox for emulating games and FreeDOS for server administration.
Many earlier versions of DOS (e.g. MS-DOS) were thoroughly documented into physical manual books, so it is difficult to gather official URLs for "More Information" links for all system commands. Sure, Microsoft still archived the FASTHELP documentation on https://learn.microsoft.com/previous-versions/tn-archive/cc722865(v=technet.10) , but other commands as simple as CD are not officially available online (i.e. specific to the DOS version).
Not to mention that many of DOS-based OSes are now deprecated in favor of modern operating systems, so I recommend taking currently-active variants of DOS (DOSBox and FreeDOS) as main references (they should be put inside the same platform code, dos instead of dosbox/freedos so other third-party DOS utilities may also be documented here).
The good news is that DOS commonly has finite and lower number of system commands compared to Windows and its PowerShell goodness, which we can also use them to compare with our current list of Windows Command Prompt documentation. In other words, a good tldr documentation for a dos command could be considered to be ported for windows as well.
Current DOS commands available on DOSBox:
- ATTRIB
- BOOT #20860
- CALL
- CD #18375
- CHDIR #18753
- CHOICE #20860
- CLS #18770
- COMMAND
- CONFIG #20860
- COPY #20860
- DEL #20860
- DELETE
- DIR #20862
- ERASE
- ECHO
- EXIT #20862
- GOTO
- HELP
- IF
- IMGMOUNT #20862
- IPXNET #20862
- KEYB #20862
- LOADFIX #20863
- LOADHIGH / LH #20863
- MKDIR / MD #20863
- MEM #20863
- MIXER #20863
- MOUNT #20865
- PATH #18769
- PAUSE
- RMDIR / RD #20865
- REM
- RENAME / REN #20864
- RESCAN #20864
- SET #20864
- SHIFT
- SUBST
- TYPE #20864
- VER #20864
Commands not found in DOSBox but in FreeDOS:
Note: Maybe we should add specific notes for DOSBox compatibility, e.g. "This command does not work on DOSBox without additional FreeDOS tools installed."
- DELTREE
- FASTHELP
- FC
- FDAPM (FreeDOS-specific)
- FDBANNER (FreeDOS-specific)
- FDISK
- FDWRAPUP (FreeDOS-specific)
- FORMAT
- MEM
- MORE
- SETLANG
- SLICEREX
- SYS
- VASK
- VCHOICE
- VCLS
- VCURSOR
- VDELAY
- VEACH
- VECHO
- VERRLVL
- VFDUTIL
- VFONT
- VFRAME
- VGOTOXY
- VINFO
- VLINE
- VPAUSE
- VPROGRES
- VSTR
- WELCOME
- XCOPY