DOS utilities
The utility programs listed below were, with the possible exception of the
REBOOT program, created entirely by MW Enterprises. Permission
is hereby given to copy, distribute and use them.
The origins of the REBOOT utility are long forgotten, it is possible that
it was created by MW Enterprises but it is equally possible that it
was created by somebody else. In any case it is a trivial program
to recreate and hence worrying about copyright issues does not seem appropriate.
- ASKW
- A very versatile prompting program that is intended to be used in batch
files for asking the user to make a selection. It allows a default
option to be chosen automatically after a time-out period, it can store
the user's choice in an environment variable or as an errorlevel and,
overall, it is a very handy little program. It has several options
and users can obtain information about them by running the program as
ASKW /?.
The ASKW program also incorporates
a crude method for detecting the sort of viruses that DOS systems were
afflicted by; if the executable file is modified it will still execute
but will also issue a warning. (DOS viruses often used to add themselves
to the end of DOS executable files)
- DC
- Aficionados of the DisplayWrite 4 (DW4) and DisplayWrite 5
(DW5) word-processing software written by IBM will likely want to have
this utility. It will read the comments from the document file
and display them on the screen. It can be given the name of a specific
file or can be asked to display the comments for a certain number of
files, or all of the DisplayWrite files in the directory. It can
also search subdirectories recursively and search for files that contain
a specific text in the comment. Using these two options together
means it is possible to search an entire disk for a Displaywrite document
file with a particular fragment of text in its comment. Using DC /?
will show all the options.
- DELAY
- Operations in batch files can be delayed for specific periods of time
using this program. It will also, optionally, provide some form
of beeping noise to accompany the delay. Its usage is: DELAY
[seconds] [beep_Hertz] and the following are all valid examples
of use:
Delay five seconds and beep at 3KHz: DELAY 5 3000
Delay five seconds, silently: DELAY
5
Delay silently for the program's
default period (1 second): DELAY
- ECHOQ
- The ordinary built-in echo command has the bad habit of always appending
a newline to whatever it is asked to display. The ECHOQ program
does not add either a new-line or carriage return character and thus
can be used to build up a line of displayed text in portions. At
MWE we make extensive use of this program when creating batch files that
create other batch files on the fly and then run them.
- FDESTROY
- As most competent computer users now know, the contents of deleted files
are left lingering on the hard disk. This program will erase the
file contents and then delete the file. Be careful! A file
deleted with this program is intended to be impossible to restore.
- GDATE
- This program allows batch files to get access to time and date information
in different ways. It is useful for creating files that use the
time or date as part of their name or for writing time and date information
into a text file.
- KEYCODE
- A tool useful to DOS programmers who need to know how a particular key
is encoded on their system.
- KEYRATES
- The keyboard auto-repeat rate and auto-repeat delay can be changed using
this program.
-
- KFLAG
- The state of the insert, num-lock, caps lock and scroll lock toggles
can be obtained and changed. With clever use of redirection and
automatically generated batch files it is possible to store the state
of the keyboard flags and then restore it later. Unlike most of
the other programs on this page, the help texts are printed when NO parameters
are given on the command line.
- LPA
- The Logical Port Assigner allows data sent to one port to be redirected
to another. Certain DOS programs would only print to, for example,
LPT1 which was very inconvenient if your target printer happened to be
attached to LPT2. This utility allows such limitations to be overcome.
- REBOOT
- This program will reboot a computer running DOS. If it used on
a computer running Windows it will most likely end the DOS session and
return to the Windows graphical interface.
- RP
- Once upon a time MWE had a dot matrix printer that needed to be reset
in between print jobs to ensure that the control operations specified
for one print job did not linger around to affect the next print job.
This little program asserts the reset signal of a parallel printer port
thereby forcing an attached printer into a hardware reset cycle.
The program can also display the status information for the printer but
the format of this information is long forgotten.
- TRUNAME
- Clever administrators of DOS systems know how to make imaginative use
of the JOIN and SUBST commands to create illusionary disk drives.
The resulting drives could provide a work-around for many awkward habits
of programs that were written thoughtlessly. One could also dynamically
map a drive letter to different directories in turn in order to process
the contents of each directory in turn without the processing program
having to know what the real name of the directory was. However,
having created a join or substitution, it was sometimes desirable to
be able to discover exactly what the real path was; this program will
allow you to do just that. For example, if you had performed SUBST U: C:\DATA
and then created a file called U:\RESULTS.TXT
then the command: TRUNAME U:\RESULTS.TXT
would report that C:\DATA\RESULTS.TXT
was the true name of the file.
Most of the above programs will provide information about their use and
command line options if they are run using the query option (/?), for example
the command below will display some information about the keyrates program:
KEYRATES /?
If the information is too much to see on one screen you can use the redirection
or pipe operators. For example, you could send all of the help information
for the ASKW program to a text file called banana using the command shown
below. The text file can then be viewed with your favourite file viewer:
ASKW /? >
banana.txt
Alternatively, use the command shown below to show the help information
one screenful at a time:
ASKW /? |
more
