Windows XP DOS Replacement?

[Slip Kid]

partition. There are some fine file manager and GUI's that most people
would never associate with the old DOS green screens. The number of
apps still being designed in/for DOS is amazing.

You can say that again.

Try saying it at an MS.public group. (

As a professional software developer, I got a little tired of using diff
and or emacs compare and one day happened upon "Delta.exe", a dos
based file and directory comparison program that is a gem.

I don't think I'm aware of it. I use CNFG, Dos Navigator, DESKTOP. I
really don't *need* a GUI...But some people are lost without it and
don't know they can escape the command line to navigate. I suppose I do
use a GUI for some things.

Although it was a commercial product at one time, it is now freeware.
Search in Google for "Open Network" and "Delta" to find it.
Yes it has a few bugs and even crashes now and then but the 5 minutes
or so you need to read the docs and learn the key presses is all it takes -
one of the finest Dos freeware programs I ever found and one that I use
every day.

I did a lot of searching awhile back, I'm surprised I didn't run across it.

Luckily it works just fine in an XP "dos" (or whatever it is) box.
To get maximum number of lines to appear, you invoke it by
delta -l50 c:\dir1 c:\dir2 <enter>

You mean it can be a replacement for cmd.exe?

The dir1 will appear on the left side of the screen and dir2 will appear on
the right side.
The tab key makes either one or the other active.
Now if dir1 is active and you type "c" (for file or subdirectory copy), it
will copy the
file or sub directory from the active window (dir1) to dir2.
If you hit the enter key on filename in dir1, it will do a beautiful file
compare on filename in dir1
and filename in dir2.

It does a lookahead and reserves space in filename in dir2 so when you copy
lines from filename in dir1
to filename in dir2, the structure of the later differences is clearly
preserved.

Yeah, and MS could easily have included something like that...

They also have some nice freeware Berkley Unix utilties ported to dos
(although I have Cygwin).

I recall most of the current *new* dos is coming out of Europe and
Eastern Europe. I believe that's where I picked up FDOS awhile back.

Just a sample of the excellent dos related stuff still out there.

It doesn't seem to have disappeared, yet.

 

[Jeff Needle]

I'm happy to announce that I've succeeded in getting File Express to run on
my XP system. Couldn't get it to install before, figured out that the
install program was nothing more than a fancy unzip program.

It really is about as good as it gets when it comes to DOS database
management, so long as the project isn't too terribly complicated.

 

[Frank Bohan]

Have several older dos programs that ran fine
on Windows 2000 but won't run at all on
the CRIPPLED dos in win XP
(stack crash, ntvdm video exceptions, etc. etc.).

Is there a freeware DOS replacement out there?

Has anyone tried lifting the command.com from W2K
and using it in Win XP?

Thanks
Jim

This site looks as if it might be of help to you
http://www.dosgames.com/xphints.php

===

Frank Bohan
¶ A bird in the hand makes it awfully hard to blow your nose.

 

[Mike Dee]

I'm happy to announce that I've succeeded in getting File Express
to run on my XP system. Couldn't get it to install before,
figured out that the install program was nothing more than a fancy
unzip program.

It really is about as good as it gets when it comes to DOS
database management, so long as the project isn't too terribly
complicated.

That's good news Jeff. Is File Express freeware?

 

[Bjorn Simonsen]

Takuon Soho wrote in

You can say that again.
As a professional software developer, I got a little tired of using diff
and or emacs compare and one day happened upon "Delta.exe", a dos
based file and directory comparison program that is a gem.
Although it was a commercial product at one time, it is now freeware.
Search in Google for "Open Network" and "Delta" to find it.

http://web.archive.org/web/20041011023915/http://www.openetwork.com/delta.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20041011023915/http://www.openetwork.com/delta.exe

All the best,
Bjorn Simonsen

 

[Troppo]

Have several older dos programs that ran fine
on Windows 2000 but won't run at all on
the CRIPPLED dos in win XP
(stack crash, ntvdm video exceptions, etc. etc.).

Is there a freeware DOS replacement out there?

[...]
There are one or two PCs (rather than operating systems) which have a
problem running DOS programs, eg IBM Thinkpad. I got it to run VBDOS and my
own programs compiled on it, but F-Prot for DOS won't work and can't be
made to, apparently. Anyone found a way to get round the ThinkPad problem?