Difference between PowerShell and CMD
What is Command Prompt?
Command Prompt is the command-line shell, which is based on the 1980s Microsoft Disk operation system (MS-DOS). It is a simple win32 application that helps users to interact with the Windows operating system using text-based commands and parameters.
Command prompt has built-in commands to run various tasks, most of which can be executed as an administrator.
Command prompt is officially known as Windows Command Processor, but sometimes it is also referred to as the CMD prompt or command shell, or even by its filename, cmd.exe. Therese Stowell developed the first version of CMD for Windows NT in December 1987. It is available in almost all versions of Windows operating system.
What is PowerShell?
PowerShell is a more advanced version of the command prompt. It is used to execute external programs like ping or copy, and automate different system administration tasks which are not accessible from cmd.exe.
It is an automated task-based command-line shell and associated scripting environment designed for the system administrators. It is built on the .NET framework. It is a powerful command-line interpreter than cmd, which can interpret both PowerShell and Batch commands.
| PowerShell | Command Prompt (CMD) |
|---|---|
| 1. It is the automated task-based command-line interface and associated scripting language based on the .NET framework. | 1. It is the default command-line interpreter for the Microsoft Windows operating system. |
| 2. It can interpret both batch and PowerShell commands. | 2. It can interpret only batch commands. |
| 3. It is used to control and automate the applications and Windows operating system on a Windows server. | 3. It is used to execute the given commands on the console, which can be used to debug the problem. |
| 4. The output generated by the PowerShell is not just a stream of characters but a collection of objects. | 4. The output generated by the command prompt is just a stream of characters(text). |
| 5. It is both a shell and scripting environment which supports the creation of large files for managing the windows operating system. | 5. It is just a shell system, which allows a user to do only easy and basic scripts for the execution of the batch file. |
