CMD.EXE or COMMAND.COM ???

Recently I encountered a problem with cmd.exe . Yes, I am talking about the command prompt that we get by typing cmd.exe and pressing enter in the “Start”->>”Run”. The error was something like “Windows couldn’t find cmd.exe”. I was annoyed and remembered that the recent virus attack affected a lot of files and cmd.exe could be one of them.

But when i typed “tracert hasibul.info” in “Start”->>”Run” to traceroute my site, I found that the command prompt appeared and it was trace routing. Atfirst I thought that cmd.exe probably was there. But l found that some of the options are not working. For example copying text from command prompt by right clicking and selecting “Mark”, “Copy” or “Paste” etc. Later I found that it was not cmd.exe rather it was command.com .

CMD.EXE is the command prompt for windows XP whereas COMMAND.COM is the command prompt of the DOS which is still there in  Windows XP. Comman.com supports many commands of DOS which CMD.EXE doesn’t support. But still when CMD.EXE was absent in my PC i could do the needful with command.exe .