Date:	Fri, 21 Oct 94 15:38:47 CDT
From:	mmeyer AT rts DOT dseg DOT ti DOT com (Mark Meyer)
To:	SOLYOM AT HUBME51 DOT bitnet
Cc:	DJGPP AT SUN DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject:	Re: LS for DOS

>>>>> "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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