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Originally Posted by dJOS
Why are Amiga dos parameters syntax so much harder to understand than ms-dos?
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Because the Amiga's CLI is more powerful it is by necessity a little more complicated, it's a classic trade-off. Commodore occasionally included programs written by third parties so there were inconsistencies at times. The only clear example that springs to mind is FastFonts that came with 1.3, it used the UNIX switch convention but then again the same thing happened with DOS applications e.g. PKZIP used UNIX style switches, so overall it's like Jope said, no harder just different.
@ajk: There are good reasons for the "quirks" of the Windows command-line interpreter which really have nothing to do with Windows, they're holdovers from DOS and CP/M, this is analogous to the way AmigaDOS inherited some of it's conventions from TRIPOS.
Tells the CLI to print the current working directory of "drive" D, it is not intended to change directories to the root of D, that is done like this:
As you've already established just entering D:\ is invalid syntax, it means nothing to the CLI. Back in QDOS/86-DOS/PC-DOS there was no directory support at all, this wasn't added until MS-DOS/PC DOS 2.0 it was then that the "quirks" you describe were added because they're in fact necessary features (see
here for an explanation as to why). Under Windows NT, DOS-like behaviour is all faked for backwards compatibility. For example drive letters are completely arbitrary, they're just mappings in the registry back to the real NT volumes, have a look in the registry under HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices to see what I mean.