Differences between Mac Terminal and Windows Command Line in terms of commands capabilities?

Question

As a Newbie in learning to use Mac Terminal which runs UNIX commands there are differences with Windows Command Line which is based on MS-DOS System commands.

What is the main differences between commands supported on each system in terms of access the OS's capabilities and for heavy everyday use ?

Also which command-line is best suited for developers and programmers work?

Solution

Both are trying to solve the same problems.

The main difference in CMD and *nix shells are the ecosystem in which they grew up. CMD/BAT hails from MS-DOS while csh,ksh,bash, etc all got their start from a particular flavor of unix/linux.

That being stated you can typically do much more with a *nix shell in terms of automation and programming, but they both are clunky compared to a modern language like python that also can be used with a shell-type interface.

Microsoft, in recent years, has invested heavily in powershell (another CLI that ships with all current versions of windows) and it is now fairly mature and has many many more features than CMD/BAT.

It really boils down to what you have access to and are comfortable using on a given platform. You can even run bash in Windows 10 now!

Comments

[Admin]

Hi, and welcome to SuperUser. Unfortunately your question is considered off-topic here on SuperUser because it's way too broad. Mac and Windows are two completely different Operating Systems having different internals. There just isn't a simple answer to give this that will cover enough. Please refer to the help center to see what kind of questions are suitable and how you can reformulate your current question to suit SuperUser.

[Admin]

it was being closed on stack overflow and i deleted it. why it's off topic this subject i think is very important to know to distinguish command-line capabilities on each system and which is more appropriate for developers.

[Admin]

if you're on Windows you have to use cmd or powershell, why wonder the differences in other platforms? Even then they're just the terminal or virtual terminal which are completely different from the shell like cmd, bash, sh, zsh, tcsh, ksh...

[Admin]

Its offtopic because it is too broad. A proper answer would likely be so big the post would not even be saved because too much content would be required to store.

[Admin]

@LPChip Thanks for clarification and thanks for Eddie Dunn's answer.

[Oghli]

Thanks for info.so I think UNIX commands is more appropriate for developers when working on integrated development environment.

[Oghli]

also for web developers it's more usable to use Unix commands when rendering on server side.