[thelist] Old School DOS tricks
Burhan Khalid
burhankh at hotmail.com
Mon Dec 10 20:44:35 CST 2001
Hey Listers :
I hadn't posted a tip for a while, so I thought this might be a good time.
Don't know how relevant this is, but I've always been a sucker for DOS ...
works great in Windows :P
<tip author="Burhan Khalid type="DOS Output">
Have you ever wanted to print out your directory listing? One easy way to do
this, is using output redirection (*nix people know what I'm talking about).
Here is a short example :
C:\>dir /s > treelisting.txt
The output redirection ( > ) will pipe the output to the text file. Neat? Of
course! Older DOS versions had a tree command, which would do a lot better
in this situation, but, it isn't available with the limited DOS that comes
with Windows. You can also, if you so incline, output it straight to your
printer like this :
C:\>dir /s > lpt1
Assuming that your printer is connected to lpt1 (the default printer port).
The only warning about using lpt1 comes with networked printers. Unless you
specify that Windows maps lpt1 to your network printer, the above command
will not work.
You can, of course, do the opposite (pipe input).
C:\myprogram.exe < mycommands.txt > myoutput.txt
I use this trick while tutoring C/C++ students. It also comes in handy when
I'm checking programming compeition submissions. I can use a default input
file, and use an output file to capture the program's output.
</tip>
<tip author="Burhan Khalid" type="Shorthand File Creation in DOS">
Usually, if you want to create a file in DOS, you would launch the built in
editor :
c:\>edit myfile.txt
What if you don't have the editor available? You can still make a file,
using the copy command :
c:\>copy con myfile.txt
Recall the copy command's syntax (shorthand) :
copy source destination
In this case, we have given the source of con (stands for console). This
will simply drop the cursor to the next line :
c:\>copy con myfile.txt
_ < cursor
From here, you can create your file. After you are done, you hit F6, which
will terminate your input.
Complete example :
------------------
c:\>copy con myfile.txt
Neat ways to create files that I might have not known.
This guy spends way to much time on the computer.^Z
1 file(s) copied
C:\>_ < cursor
</tip>
I know I owe.
Burhan Khalid
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