command interpreter

command interpreter

[kə′mand ‚in′tər·prə·tər]

(computer science)

A program that processes commands and other input and output from an active terminal in a time-sharing system.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

command interpreter

(operating system)

A program which reads textual commands from the user or from a file and executes them. Some commands may be executed directly within the interpreter itself (e.g. setting variables or control constructs), others may cause it to load and execute other files.

Unix's command interpreters are known as shells.

When an IBM PC is booted BIOS loads and runs the MS-DOS command interpreter into memory from file COMMAND.COM found on a floppy disk or hard disk drive. The commands that COMMAND.COM recognizes (e.g. COPY, DIR, PRN) are called internal commands, in contrast to external commands which are executable files.

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

command processor

A system program that accepts instructions from a command line and executes them. For example, COMMAND.COM was the command processor for the 16-bit DOS operating system. It was replaced with CMD.EXE, the 32-bit Windows command processor, which added support for file names longer than eight characters (see 8.3 names). In Unix/Linux, command processors are called "shells" (see bash shell, C shell and Bourne shell). See cmd abc's and command line.

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