Mail Archives: opendos/2003/09/26/20:27:52
On 25 Sep 2003 at 17:15, DONALD PEDDER wrote:
> > What command do you want the confirm *with*?
> >
> > Replace?
> > Copy?
> > Xcopy?
>
> I haven't used replace before. I see that you can specify to only write
> files that don't exist, but then you'd have to use the command again if
> you DO want to replace some existing files.
Yes, but that's not an unreasonable thing to do.
Allso, many versions of replace will let you confirm
the files to be copied.
> Copy or xcopy would be good. I have no idea why confirm would be turned
> off by default - that makes no sense (it's one of the things I don't like
> about Unix too - you can overwrite/remove something you didn't intend to
> with a typo).
Because anybody using the commandline is expected to
know what they are doing.
Xcopy is a real pain as the command options vary so
drastically between versions. To give anything but
the most basic commands requires knowing which OS &
version you've got.
With Copy, confirm is off by default because older
versions of MS-DOS and PC-DOS didn't *have* a
confirm option. So having it enabled by default
would break a *lot* of batch files and other things.
Trust me, I've had to deal with install files and
the like that are *ancient* (because they had to
work on things like DOS 2.1 or 3.0). And getting
them to work with options set to behave differently
can take *hours*.
So consider what that'd mean to companies that may
have hundreds or thousands of such files to "fix".
Thus, the defaults on any "old" commands will be
such that they are compatible with the oldest
version of DOS that is likely to still be used.
Which for some rather common things (especially the
sort of "embedded" systems that are the main target
of DR-DOS these days) can be as old as DOS 3.1.
Personally, my advice is to use DR-DOS as the OS,
and 4dos as the command processor.
--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at krypton dot rain dot com
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