First, let me clear things up, Windows no more have MS-DOS Prompt since ME. The black box you see in Windows NT (2k, XP, Vista) is called Command Prompt, and is significantly different compared to real DOS prompt.
OK, now to the question. Windows' Command Prompt is a shell, Linux Terminal is a shell. That's wrap it up. The difference between them is like Mandarin Orange and Persian Orange (one is more sour than the other, one is more soft and sweet, differences like that).
Linux's Terminal usually doesn't run things directly, they have a shell program like Bash (Bourne Again Shell), sh (Bourne Shell), csh (C Shell), ksh (Korn Shell), dash (Debian Almquist Shell). These shells provides a convenient environment for program to work in and each of them provides their own scripting languages for user to automate the shell.
On contrary, there is only one official shell for Windows, the Command Prompt (well, I lied, there is PowerShell but practically nobody apart from programmer uses it... as of yet). Command Prompt has a scripting language too, usually called batch file (with file extension .bat).
Despite that there is many shell in Linux, many share the same basic commands. For example, file deletion is "rm", change directory "cd", move file "mv", open help "man" or "info", etc. Windows' Command Prompt equivalent is "del", "cd", "move", and "help" respectively.
In general, Linux's shell scripting language is much, much, more powerful than batch scripting language. This is because of difference in philosophy, in Linux, program's main interface should be text stream and GUI is made on top of that text stream, in Windows, they ignore text stream and thought that modern OS should be GUI oriented. This ignorance of text stream is both Window's power and weaknesses. Many system administrator prefers a command line interface to work with since command line is simple, thus more powerful than GUI. Many users, on the other hand, prefers GUI, since they think clicking is easier than typing. Problem is, it is easy to create a GUI from text-based program, but not the other way.
Source:
Using both Windows and Linux.
Asker's rating & comment
- Thanks. This is very helpfu. =)
