The command tail is one or more bytes of ASCII text representing a program's command-line arguments. When starting the program, the user provides the command tail by typing arguments, such as filenames and switches, after the program name. COMMAND.COM copies these arguments to the program as the command tail. Programs that start other programs can also provide command tails.
The command tail has three components: a leading byte that specifies the length of the text, the text itself, and a carriage-return character (ASCII 0Dh) that marks the command tail but is not counted in the length of the text. The following example shows a typical command tail:
SampleCommandTail db 7, " /c dir", 0Dh
The text should start with at least one space character (ASCII 20h), since some programs may require a leading space.