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List of command-line interpreters

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A command line interpreter is a program which reads a line of text the user has typed and interprets this text in the context of a given system.

Command line interpreters have the advantage that the user may issue a lot of commands in a very terse and efficient way. The downside is that one has to know the commands and their parameters. The graphical user interfaces were an answer to this problem. However for certain tasks they become difficult to use as well, because of the wealth of menues and dialog boxes and therefore a well designed command line interface may be easier to use.

Examples of command line interpreters (not actually well designed, but grown historically and intensivly used)

  • bash (Unix)
  • command.com (MS-DOS, later versions of the Microsoft operating systems have command line interpreters with the same name but with more commands they can interpret)
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