5 posts tagged with "dos"

This is just ... for fun.

As you know, MS DOS didn't make any differences between MyFile.txt, myfile.txt, MYFILE.txt since DOS isn't case sensitive.

If you don't believe me, just start notepad, type a few characters and save your work once as MyFile.txt then as myfile.txt then as MYFILE.txt. Then look to your folder, how many documents did you have ? Just one.

Under Linux, you would have had three files; not under DOS.

What if we asked DOS to change its ways?

Six years ago, I needed a DOS script that would allow me to find the list of every file in a folder on a Windows machine and generate a .csv file with that list.

Once the .csv file had been generated, I could then process it in MS Excel, for example, and sort/filter it or, why not, in Python using the Pandas library.

By the use of a script, it's possible to ask WinSCP to synchronize your host and remote machine i.e. if a file is newer on the host, copy it to your remote server and the opposite.

If a file has been added to your host, copy it to your remote server and vice versa.

I'm using such script for making a full backup of some of my folders to my Synology.

For people who like working in a console, Windows Terminal can be seen as a successor of the old DOS console; you know the black screen where you can type commands like dir or mkdir.

Windows Terminal is a multi-tab software so instead of having multiple windows, you just have multiple tabs but the most killing features for me is the possibility to have a DOS console in one tab, a Powershell one in a second tab, having one or more tabs for Linux and why not, a tab for a SSH connection.

And that feature is really comfortable! Using the same window, you can have multiple active consoles and f.i. share your Linux history between tabs. Pretty cool!

Before switching to WSL2 and the Linux console, I wrote VBS scripts from time to time. It looks like VBA but for the DOS console.

A VBS script for DOS is a text file written in the Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) programming language that can be executed directly from the DOS command prompt. It allows you to automate tasks and perform repetitive operations on your computer.

It's just like Linux Bash scripts but for the DOS.

Do you think it would be possible to offer an auto-update function in such scripts? The answer is yes.