-=> ROBERT COMER wrote to JOE BARR <=-

 RC> I don't see why someone couldn't write a shell that has DOS compatible
 RC> naming of the commands...

Someone could, but considering how primitive COMMAND.COM is compared to a
Unix shell, it would be silly. Easier and more useful would be a set of
aliases to map those DOS commands to Unix equivalents. At least some
distros have already done some of that; for example, my old Slackware
mapped "dir" to "ls".

Some commands are already shared in common -- in fact, DOS copied them from
Unix -- such as "more"; although the "more" clone known
as "less" (ha ha)  
is better.

In some cases, an alias might be misleading, because although the names
would be the same, the functions wouldn't, quite; e.g., Unix's "rm" works
somewhat differently from DOS' "del". Ultimately, it's better just to
accept that this is a new operating system with new commands to learn. It's
not intrinsically more difficult than DOS; it just looks that way if you're
familiar with DOS and not with Unix. But your DOS experience should help --
many of the concepts, if not the details, do carry over.

BTW, an interesting point about commands like "ls" and
"rm" is that they're
actually external programs, not built into the shell as in DOS. (Some
shells reimplement some of them internally, however.)

... I like working on computers!  Please hand me the hammer.

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