Projects - Dos Utils

Standalone programs
Batch file assistants

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The Dos Utils package is a small collection of utilities that I had found helpful in my early years. Each of them (except seekout) had been written previously in QBasic or Euphoria. When I learned more about C, I figured it was time to rewrite all the small stuff. The seekout program is an exception: an administrator at my high school was interested in automated search and delete.

Downloads

Go to the download section of the project page to find the newest releases.

Features

For general help, all of the programs accept the `/?' option.

Standalone programs

ccn: Produce a fake command prompt that gives error messages randomly, or makes disk noise. It stands for Controlled Command eNvironment.
qccn: The Quiet Controlled Command eNvironment. It is related to ccn, except it keeps track of the current directory like a real prompt. It also logs the user's keystrokes to a specified file.
fper: File ParsER. Ever had Word Pad mess up a text file by adding a blank line every other line? FPER will try to undo the damage by deleting every other line (if blank), adapting if a line is not blank.
seekout: Seek out and delete files. The idea is: write to a text file a list of filenames (1 per line), and seekout will remove them recursively from a directory you specify. Safety features have been added so that it will reject any pattern that matches all files. This is the first ever program request, which came from the administration at my school. As a result, it is the most jazzed-up program in this project. For instance, it is the only one with a status indicator.

Batch file assistants

The following programs create a batch file in the current directory called `return.bat'. Upon executing one of these batch files, an environment variable will be set that corresponds to the name of the program. These are mainly useful for batch programming.

dtemake: Return the current date as 8 digits in the form YYYYMMDD. This could be useful for making files that are updated daily.
input: Accept input from the user. This is a good alternative to the terrible kludges that batch programmers are often forced to use to accept user input! No more using the find command to get input ... that should be reason enough to use this program. :^)
savepath: Save the current path and drive to the `SAVEPATH' and `SAVEDRV' environment variables. This could come in handy if you have a program that changes to a different directory and you want to restore the original directory.

Documentation

See the Project documentation page. Whenever I refer to a page like this: COPYING, it means that you should go to the aforementioned page and find the file there.

Bugs

See BUGS for user-visible bug list.

Contact

Michael Olson

Installation

See INSTALL if you need information about building the code or installing the program from Linux.

License

This program is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License. See COPYING for more information. Basically it means that you may use the program freely and copy freely, giving the same rights to those after you as I am giving you.