PowerShell and DOS commands?

Dear old Dad who is a coding enthusiast and does I.T. security was telling me all about Power Shell. Now, does Power Shell let you run all the prompt commands as if it were still DOS 6.22? Do power shell files still run under .VBS or should they be given a new extension? [/style]

Say I wanted to create a .m3u list of all my MP3 files. [/style]
Under cmd.exe I would just do a dir /b C:\MP3_Directory\*.mp3 > "C:\Users ... Desktop\mp3list.m3u" [/style]

Can I call any executable I want on the PC with any parameters? How would that work? [/style]

To you guys that's probably child's play. Are all DOS commands essentially still supported under power shell. Man just reading through some of the stuff makes me feel like the Forrest Gump of coders. Please don't hurt me because I'm a newb.[/style]

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<message edited by Dark Water Streams on Sunday, August 14, 2011 6:18 AM>

So the answer is a resounding sometimes. First let's start with the fact that the powershell prompt is most definitely *not* the dos cmd prompt. However the developers of powershell wanted to make it as inviting as possible to both people accustom to DOS prompts and for that matter to people accustom to *nix shells. To this end powershell has very robust aliasing. So in powershell, the command to do the equivalent of dir is Get-ChildItem. To fully do what your DOS command does would be:
 
Get-ChildItem C:\MP3_Directory\* -Include *.mp3 -Recurse > "C:\Users ... Desktop\mp3list.m3u"
 
In an effort to make it feel more familiar to DOS users, the developers include a default alias Dir->Get-ChildIte. So you could do:
 
Dir C:\MP3_Directory\* -Include *.mp3 -Recurse > "C:\Users ... Desktop\mp3list.m3u"
 
But you are still running Get-ChildItem and not the DOS dir command.
 
Yes you can call any executeable with any parameters. So this would work fine:
 
Notepad.exe C:\Temp\file.txt
 
As for whether DOS commands work in Powershell, if they are actual executeables that are in the path and there is not an existing powershell alias with the same name then yes they work. For instance edlin works fine.
 
Powershell scripts end with a PS1 extension not VBS. For that matter DOS scripts are batch files (BAT extension) not Visual Basic Scripts (VBS extension). VBS files run in the Windows Script Host (WSH) not DOS.

ebgreen
Powershell scripts end with a PS1 extension not VBS. For that matter DOS scripts are batch files (BAT extension) not Visual Basic Scripts (VBS extension). VBS files run in the Windows Script Host (WSH) not DOS.

While we're at it: batch files are by no means "DOS scripts". On NT-based Windows versions (NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, and all server versions), batch scripts run in a 32-bit command interpreter (CMD.exe) that has nothing whatsoever to do with DOS or its 16-bit command interpreter (COMMAND.COM). The NT-based versions even use a different default extension (.cmd), because CMD.exe has far more features than COMMAND.COM (loops, conditionals, string operations, ...). For compatibility reasons .bat is also supported as an extension for batch scripts, though.

Good point.