Learn DOS without blowing up my computer?

[Darwin Botts]

Hi everyone! New here and don't know anything about computers. 

0 computer skills!

Got curious when I saw the "DOS" forum. Though I don't know enough to even make a question about DOS in it. From the looks of DOS:

               You can like change your computer upside down.

Experimenting is one thing. Though permanent damage to my computer is another.

Is it possible to safely learn DOS ? Like how I screw around with learning HTML using Notepad?

Thank goddess I learned to save the files as .htm that way I can see how horrible the dumb sites I make look! LOL


                   Thank you everyone for your responses!

[truenorth]

I find it intriguing given your other post on the hardware forum where you profess such limited knowledge/skills re computer (zero i believe you profess) that you would be asking a question about "DOS". First that you would even be aware of the term and secondly why you would put a priority on that when we are so way beyond the fundamentals of DOS in todays modern operating systems. Perhaps you could explain that seeming paradox? truenorth

[BC_Programmer]

The contents of the DOS forum these days rarely ever have anything to do with actual DOS.

For a little background, DOS is a MS Operating System that was rather popular and commonplace for quite a number of years.

Nowadays, almost all of the questions in the "DOS" forum are not about DOS but rather about the Windows command interpreter, cmd.exe.

From the looks of DOS:

You can like change your computer upside down.

Not sure what you mean. Very few windows features are hidden away as Command Prompt applications, and those that are are boring business-y things to do with setting File ACLs and other ho hum tasks.

If I am to understand what you might mean by your question, however, you might be thinking of Batch files. Batch files allow you to sequence a group of DOS commands together into a small program of sorts that the interpreter runs. In general, this is what questions and discussions in the DOS forum are about, somebody needs help/assistance with their batch file or creating a certain batch file or a certain function that they need to perform with a batch file.

Anyways, with notepad you can create batch files (and save them as ".bat" as you save your web page files as ".htm" or ".html"). then you can double-click to run them.

Of course wether it's "dangerous" depends on what your working with. If you work with commands that destroy data and do something wrong, you could erase files that you didn't mean to erase. Generally though unless you REALLY screw up (I can't really think of a way to do it on purpose at the moment) you're not going to mess anything up. A quick example is easy to demonstrate.

paste the following in a notepad file:

Code: [Select]

dir %userprofile%
pause

save it as a ".bat" file somewhere, and then double-click it, and you should be presented with what many call a "DOS window" (but is more accurately called a Command Prompt Window) which will list the contents of your Profile Directory ("Directory" is the real name for Folders, Windows just pretends they are called folders so fewer people get confused), and then it will say "press any key to continue". In this case we used the command "dir", which is a fairly commonplace command for listing the contents of a directory. We told it to look in our user profile by giving it %UserProfile% which is a variable that contains the appropriate directory path for your profile. In my case, it expands to "C:\Users\BC_Programming" so dir lists the files contained there. Then the pause instruction tells the command interpreter to wait until you press a key.

Here's a "tutorial" on batch file creation that might help explain the concepts a little better then I have.

[michaewlewis]

Isn't this where we introduce Linux? or maybe virtual machines?

If you're that interested in command line, perhaps you should check out Linux, since that's an operating system that still relies heavily on the command line.

Also, if you're doing stuff in the command line that you are worried about screwing up your system, create a virtual machine with Windows or Linux and create a snapshot of the system before doing your experiments. That way if you really screw it up, you can easily revert to a stable state.