Why is it that some commands on the CLI are more powerful than others?
Why is it that Windows is not usually considered to be as powerful as unix based systems?
Being a beginner of Unix one significant difference between the two is how the OS is built around the core.
I do not know too much of technical details but it so happens that in unix systems the Terminal has the major access to the entire OS.
There is the core which is controlled by the Terminal on top of which the UI is built.
In case of Windows it was the same in Windows 98.ย It was not called the Terminal but was commonly known as DOS.
The user could boot into DOS before the OS booted up and hence was able to gain every control to the system.
This was a major security flaw though, as a user who could login to DOS could wipe out the Hard drive, change passwords and do anything even though he did not have his own administrative account. Additional security needed to be added by giving a DOS boot password, which could again have been circumvented by removing the battery of the Motherboard for about 5 minutes.
These were not hacks but merely small things that could have been done by any layman.
This was probably one of the reasons why they changed the way the OS was built from XP onwards.
The DOS accessible to the user was INSIDE the OS instead of the other way around. Any OS-dangerous tasks would be blocked by the OS, even though the command was given from CLI.
This thing was designed to be powerful enough to give more security features to Windows, which kind of turned out to be one of its greatest weakness till date when compared to Unix systems.
Strength or Weakness
