Microsoft manager: Command Prompt shouldn’t have been around for so long

According to Rich Turner, senior program manager at Microsoft, his company shouldn’t have kept the command prompt, or cmd.exe, alive for as long as it has. According to him, cmd.exe should no longer be used.

Rich Turner, who is a senior program manager at Microsoft Windows Console & Command-Line, takes to Twitter to call for the command prompt can’t be used anymore. “Cmd is in maintenance mode. Its function is to maintain compatibility for outdated and immutable scripts and that’s it. It shouldn’t be used for interactive shell work.” He redirects users to PowerShell, which he believes is the future.

In an explanation to a user who reports that he would prefer an extended version of cmd, he adds that the sole purpose of cmd’s existence was to run MS-DOS scripts and commands for people moving from DOS and the Windows 9x versions to Windows NT. “It shouldn’t have lasted that long.”

Microsoft replaced the command prompt with PowerShell in Windows 10 in 2016, but the commandline tool is still embedded in the operating system and presumably still has a large user base.

Command Prompt and PowerShell