Date: Sat, 22 Oct 94 21:29:01 JST From: Stephen Turnbull To: mmeyer AT rts DOT dseg DOT ti DOT com Cc: SOLYOM AT HUBME51 DOT BITNET, DJGPP AT SUN DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu Subject: LS for DOS Date: Fri, 21 Oct 94 15:38:47 CDT From: mmeyer AT rts DOT dseg DOT ti DOT com (Mark Meyer) >>>>> "SA" == SOLYOM ANDRAS writes: SA> It would really be good to have the unix utilities running on SA> MSDOS. Or it would even be better if had MSDOS utilities on MSDOS SA> that works like their UNIX counterpart, but which are especially SA> developed for MSDOS. I agree completely. Fortunately, someone else has already done this. Maybe several have, but the system I work (play?) with now is by Ian Stewartson, based on code written by Charles Forsyth. I had to hunt through a few older versions of stuff before I found this, but the folks on this list were able to point me to the "latest and greatest". Ian has both a shell and a set of utilities. The shell is called MS Shell 2.3, dated August 1994, and can be obtained from the Simtel archives in /pub/msdos/sysutil/ms_sh23b.zip (binaries) /pub/msdos/sysutil/ms_sh23s.zip (sources) If you need to, ask me (or anyone here, for that matter) how to access Simtel. SA> I personally was so in love with the UNIX style file name SA> globbing ... Me too! I had the utilities from the GNUish project for a while, but they, like MS-DOS, have the 127-character command line barrier. Sucks! However, Ian's utilities all have the convention that @filename in argv denotes a file that contains additional parameters. MS Shell creates these parameter files and passes them to the utilities _automatically_. There's a file, extend.lst, that contains a list of executables and how they take their parameters (Unixlike, DOSlike, etc.), and this takes a little setting up (though Ian provides a sample extend.lst you can start with). However, once the file is set up, you have yourself a nice Unixoid environment. You can even call DOS programs in a Unixlike manner (- for options, / for paths), and the shell automatically converts them to / and \ before passing them to the DOS command! I mentioned Ian had a set of utilities. They're all configured to work with his shell. There's ls, rm, cp, mv (I _love_ being able to mv directories!), mkdir, rmdir, and more (I mean more utilities, of course). Unlike MS Shell, however, the utilities are sparsely documented and source is not available (at least from Simtel - has anybody else got them?). What's worse, Ian left the Net after uploading his code two months ago. (His documentation does give a postal address where he could be reached, though.) Anyway, the utilities are also at Simtel, in /pub/msdos/sysutil/uxutl23a.zip /pub/msdos/sysutil/uxutl23b.zip /pub/msdos/sysutil/uxutl23c.zip /pub/msdos/sysutil/uxutl23d.zip The only problems I've had are 1) I can't figure out how to make expr multiply; 2) df does nothing unless you specify a drive; 3) which options -a and -i don't work as advertised. I don't do Windows, so I have no idea how it works under them. I will say that I like the shell so much that I've got SHELL=C:/bin/sh.exe -0 in my CONFIG.SYS. -- Mark Meyer | mmeyer AT dseg DOT ti DOT com | Texas Instruments, Inc., Plano, TX +--------------------+ Every day, Jerry Junkins is grateful that I don't speak for TI. "Benson, you are so mercifully free from the ravages of intelligence."