Solved I have a general question about powershell, Windows terminal, and command prompt.

I always wondered this for a while and I just now decided to ask the question. I found quite a few answers online but I just wanted to see if anyone can break it down better here.

I always found it odd that some commands only work in command prompt while others have to be put into powershell. And then terminal which then theoretically has all of them in to choose from.

It's weird to me that Windows terminal couldn't just identify the command and then switch to the appropriate terminal.

So why is it broken up this way?

I know powershell was created for scripting and stuff but why does older commands have to be put in the command prompt?

For example, I was trying to delete a service and I was doing it in Windows terminal and was wondering why it didn't work and then I remembered I had to use command prompt to do that.

It just makes things confusing

Windows Terminal is just a host, a container if you will, for the other shells (cmd, pwsh, powershell, etc.). Terminal doesn't actually process any commands on its own.

Figuring out which command you mean would mostly work, I think, but you'd run into weird ones and chaos would ensue. The one you mentioned is a good example. If you typed 'sc something something' into some theoretical "Figure It Out Terminal," did you mean the sc executable command for configuring services, or sc as in the PowerShell alias for Set-Content. Oh, and that alias only exists in Windows PowerShell. PowerShell does not have it (probably for that reason, I guess).

Thanks. Yeah it looks like this whole time from doing more research I misunderstood what windows terminal was.

I viewed it as an all in one command line tool. Which I guess is true in a way, you can choose from all the command (terminal/shells?) that you want.

I was hoping that if you were using terminal it would just see the command your trying to do and then automatically switch to the right shell/terminal to complete the job.

Such as deleting a service, entering the command in terminal would automatically switch to command prompt to carry out the action. That would be nice.

I am trying to teach the little bit I know to my brother in law who is getting into IT and as I was showing them common commands and such we found it jarring to having to keep switching between them. And having to look up which ones work in which terminal/shell. Luckily the internet exists to guide you on which one to use.

It also doesn't help that since I got hit with this disability my knowledge has become as a gold fish and I am slowing down considerably.

@andrew129260, it might be helpful to set a different color scheme in order to differentiate the shells.

As @pseymour stated, terminal is just a container and has therefore no 'logic' built-in to determine which shell to use.

CMD is an evolution of IBM DOS (Disk Operating System) which at one point was at the core of 16 bit Windows
with config.sys & autoexec.bat to get the whole thing going.
Since NT, It became CMD a stand-alone entity, and is still there for compatibility purposes.
The 2 versions of Powershell came later.

​

If you get in the habit of always typing 'sc.exe' instead of 'sc,' you'll have luck in cmd, pwsh and powershell.

andrew129260 said:

Such as deleting a service, entering the command in terminal would automatically switch to command prompt to carry out the action. That would be nice.

Click to expand...

Yep, I get what you're saying, but like I said, how would it know? Maybe when you type 'sc,' you mean the service configuration program. Maybe when I type it, I mean 'Set-Content.'

Let's review the history of Windows.

The only console that Windows originally provided was conhost. Both CMD and PS would run inside a conhost session. But you had the same problems as @pseymour outlined: CMD doesn't understand any PS instructions, but PS will consider anything that isn't a native command (or loaded module) as an external task to exec.

"taskkill /f /im explorer.exe" isn't native to PS, so PS just tries exec'ing it. If that attempt fails, PS throws an error.

Great, it runs! Therefore PS is just like CMD!!

Since this "convenience" works so often, naive users often believe a PS shell works exactly the same as CMD. Except for things like how they treat commands with environment variables, and the PS aliases for "dir", "del", "ren" and whatnot are not perfect replicas of their CMD cousins.

The major flaw is Terminal doesn't provide a strong contextual clue to remind you which shell you're in.

The old CMD was in a black window, PS opened in this teal window. And you didn't forget which one was which. But today, Terminal just provides you both shells on a black background without a visual reminder.

pseymour said:

If you get in the habit of always typing 'sc.exe' instead of 'sc,' you'll have luck in cmd, pwsh and powershell.

Click to expand...

huh TIL. I just found this too


thank you. Never realized that.

pseymour said:

Yep, I get what you're saying, but like I said, how would it know? Maybe when you type 'sc,' you mean the service configuration program. Maybe when I type it, I mean 'Set-Content.'

Click to expand...

great point

Thanks everyone. Very helpful.

Looks like I have a lot of reading and catching up to do.

Each shell (cmd.exe, powershell.exe (Windows Powershell) and pwsh.exe(Microsoft Powershell)) all contain built-in functionality, operators etc that are unique to the shell and then they all have access to applications outside of the the shell (basically anything thats an executable stored on a path variable within the shell)

For example in powershell or pwsh you can type this and see those distinctions.

Powershell/pwsh do a good job of creating aliases to common commands you might see in cmd and even in Linux

These nerd threads are my favorite. Thanks @andrew129260!

pseymour said:

These nerd threads are my favorite. Thanks @andrew129260!

Click to expand...

anytime. I love creating batch files and messing around in the terminals in general. I am young enough to not have to use dos to run doom, but old enough to still need it for quite a few other things when I was using windows 98 and onward. Winget blows my mind haha so cool. Linux has had package managers for awhile but I will never not be tickled by seeing a color progress bar downloading from the internet in a terminal.

But yeah since this thing has been going on with me my memory has been significantly affected and I am losing touch with everything I used to know which is quite frustrating.

Part of the reason teaching my brother in law has been so invaluable. It helps me retain my thoughts a bit so hopefully I can go back to work once this is figured out.

Oh installing doom from floppies, those were the days