It must be true I read/heard it in the news!

[Monty J. Harder]

"Brian Densmore" <DensmoreB at ctbsonline.com> wrote:

> > CMD.EXE is a shell that executes as a native process.
> CMd.exe executes as a window it does not have direct access to the
hardware. A shell would have
> direct access to the hardware. There is a difference.

  Hardly.  At least not in a halfway-decently-designed OS.  A shell runs in
userspace, and makes system calls to gain access to the hardware via device
drivers that run (at least partially) in kernel mode.  The shell runs on top
of the OS.  Back in DOS 6 days, I used 4DOS as my command interpreter
instead of COMMAND.COM, because the latter is so limiting.  For the same
reason, I have Cygwin installed on the computers I use both at work and
home, so that even when I'm in Windows I have a decent shell to use.