Date:	Sat, 22 Oct 94 21:29:01 JST
From:	Stephen Turnbull <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>
To:	mmeyer AT rts DOT dseg DOT ti DOT com
Cc:	SOLYOM AT HUBME51 DOT BITNET, DJGPP AT SUN DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject:	LS for DOS

   Date: Fri, 21 Oct 94 15:38:47 CDT
   From: mmeyer AT rts DOT dseg DOT ti DOT com (Mark Meyer)


   >>>>> "SA" == SOLYOM ANDRAS <solyom AT bmeik DOT eik DOT bme DOT hu> writes:
    SA> It would really be good to have the unix utilities running on
    SA> MSDOS. Or it would even be better if had MSDOS utilities on MSDOS
    SA> that works like their UNIX counterpart, but which are especially
    SA> developed for MSDOS.

	   I agree completely.  Fortunately, someone else has already
   done this.  Maybe several have, but the system I work (play?) with now
   is by Ian Stewartson, based on code written by Charles Forsyth.  I had
   to hunt through a few older versions of stuff before I found this, but
   the folks on this list were able to point me to the "latest and
   greatest".
	   Ian has both a shell and a set of utilities.  The shell is
   called MS Shell 2.3, dated August 1994, and can be obtained from the
   Simtel archives in

	   /pub/msdos/sysutil/ms_sh23b.zip (binaries) 
	   /pub/msdos/sysutil/ms_sh23s.zip (sources)

   If you need to, ask me (or anyone here, for that matter) how to access
   Simtel.

    SA> I personally was so in love with the UNIX style file name
    SA> globbing ...

	   Me too!  I had the utilities from the GNUish project for a
   while, but they, like MS-DOS, have the 127-character command line
   barrier.  Sucks!  However, Ian's utilities all have the convention
   that @filename in argv denotes a file that contains additional
   parameters.  MS Shell creates these parameter files and passes them to
   the utilities _automatically_.  There's a file, extend.lst, that
   contains a list of executables and how they take their parameters
   (Unixlike, DOSlike, etc.), and this takes a little setting up (though
   Ian provides a sample extend.lst you can start with).  However, once
   the file is set up, you have yourself a nice Unixoid environment.  You
   can even call DOS programs in a Unixlike manner (- for options, / for
   paths), and the shell automatically converts them to / and \ before
   passing them to the DOS command!
	   I mentioned Ian had a set of utilities.  They're all
   configured to work with his shell.  There's ls, rm, cp, mv (I _love_
   being able to mv directories!), mkdir, rmdir, and more (I mean more
   utilities, of course).  Unlike MS Shell, however, the utilities are
   sparsely documented and source is not available (at least from Simtel
   - has anybody else got them?).  What's worse, Ian left the Net after
   uploading his code two months ago.  (His documentation does give a
   postal address where he could be reached, though.)  Anyway, the
   utilities are also at Simtel, in

	   /pub/msdos/sysutil/uxutl23a.zip
	   /pub/msdos/sysutil/uxutl23b.zip
	   /pub/msdos/sysutil/uxutl23c.zip
	   /pub/msdos/sysutil/uxutl23d.zip

   The only problems I've had are 
	   1) I can't figure out how to make expr multiply;
	   2) df does nothing unless you specify a drive;
	   3) which options -a and -i don't work as advertised.

	   I don't do Windows, so I have no idea how it works under them.
   I will say that I like the shell so much that I've got
   SHELL=C:/bin/sh.exe -0 in my CONFIG.SYS.

   -- 
   Mark Meyer                                               | mmeyer AT dseg DOT ti DOT com |
   Texas Instruments, Inc.,  Plano, TX                      +--------------------+
   Every day, Jerry Junkins is grateful that I don't speak for TI.
	    "Benson, you are so mercifully free from the ravages of intelligence."

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