April 1 (Z5MV)

[PointyHairedJedi]

Originally Posted by Infinite Improbability

Quick poll. How many DOS commands can everyone rattle off the tops of their heads?

One. Which is strange, given that I used to play the likes of Theme Park, Civ and Monkey Island through DOS (though Civ was a CD-ROM re-release, so I don't think I get any cred for that really).

[Nate the Great]

Okay, let's see...

cd
cd\
dir
dir/w

I guess that's it.

[Gatac]

Without looking things up...

md
rd
dir
edit
type
deltree
echo
del
format
fdisk

And, of course...

win

That'd be pretty much 95% of everything I ever did under DOS and via DOS shell in Windows. (Of course, I remember a hell of a lot of options and tricks for those, too, but I felt it would be cheating to list them all seperately.)

Gatac

[Sa'ar Chasm]

> C/
> C/windows
> C/windows/run
> Run/dammit/run

[Derek]

I still use DOS. Or at least I use "Command Prompt" on my Windows computers. 'dir' and 'cd' are the main ones I use from the command shell. And I use the command prompt all the time on my linux computers.

Gatac's list is good, but there's a great DOS command he didn't list: 'rem.' It's 'echo' without the output! Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty rem:

c:\> rem
c:\> rem help
c:\> rem quit
c:\> rem exit
c:\> rem bye
c:\> rem hello?
c:\> rem eat flaming death
c:\> rem ^C
c:\> rem ^C
c:\> rem ^D
c:\> rem

---
Note the consistent command flags and error reportage. Rem is
generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm
the novice with verbosity.

(Okay, I started borrowing from The Ed man joke page at the end there.)

[Zeke]

On our family's DOS computers, a 386 and later a 486, I actually didn't use the built-in commands a lot because I made my own .bat files. k was Commander Keen, j was Jill of the Jungle, and so on. It was also on those computers that I learned how to program in C. My crowning achievement was a simple Windows facsimile I made from scratch -- it couldn't do much, but it had graphical icons for starting programs. I called it WinDOS.

I still use the Command Prompt for one important thing: a program I wrote years ago called 5mv.exe. It takes a fiver and formats it for HTML. (By the way, I've found out there are two command prompts available from the Run dialog box: "command" and "cmd". The latter is the one you want, as it has more features.)

Originally Posted by Gatac

And, of course...

win

DOS for the win?

[Nate the Great]

Jill of the Jungle! Awesome! You have to love those, especially when they (the Epic people) made fun of the Apogee heroes and called Commander Keen "yesterday's news."

Okay, so I knew about win, format, and fdisk too.

[Gatac]

And DuckTales, too.

Then again, we had some good times on the Commodore 64, too...ah, Turrican.

Gatac

[Nate the Great]

Ducktales? Great show, but I found the game weird. Using a wooden cane as a pogo stick? Bouncing on rocks to turn them into gemstones?