[thelist] Old School DOS tricks

Diego Lafuente diego at minid.net
Mon Dec 10 21:19:18 CST 2001


nice...

Burhan Khalid wrote:

> 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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>






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