Could you perform a very basic task in MS-DOS?

Your boss comes to you one day and gives you a seemingly simple task.

All you have to do is locate a folder called “SOMEOLDSHIT,” open it, find a file called “OLDFILE,” and copy it onto a disk. He then leads you to a small room containing a clunky looking old computer on a desk and hands you a 5.25" floppy disk, and flips power switch the machine on to get you started, then steps out and shuts and locks the door behind him, saying, “Knock only when you’re finished.”

After a few minutes of startup business, you are presented with a glowing, blank screen, a C prompt in the top left corner, and a blinking green cursor.

Do you know what to do?
.

Dir, no problem.

Sure. I do it every day.

C:>COPY \SOMEOLDSHIT\OLDFILE A:

or

c:>XCOPY \SOMEOLDSHIT\OLDFILE A: /V

Hell no. I started at Win98SE.
Looks like there will be a decaying corpse surrounded by human waste.

I still go to a command window on occasion. It’s fast and easy (and you’ve got more options than Windows gives you) for various file management tasks. Also for batch processing.

dir oldfile.* /s
cd relevant directory tree

copy oldfile.* a:

or

copy c:…\someoldshit\oldfile a:

The copy itself is easy. But if the folder structure is cluttered at all, I’d need/want to figure out how to search the drive using a built-in command, if possible. I don’t remember what the utility is for that.

I know that on modern Windows machines, in the command prompt, you can type “help” to get a list of commands that you can run. Assuming that MS-DOS has that functionality, I should be able to figure it out quick enough. If not, it might take a bit more effort - or just searching myself.

Easy cheese. I spent years running MS-DOS.

It’s been a few decades. Perhaps with the help of hypnosis, I might dig that knowledge out of some cranny of my brain.

I can do part of it, which is to tell the boss he’s screwed before he even starts because a computer that old predates long file names, and if it’s not 8.3, it’s not there. He’s going to go have to find out what the actual 8.3 file structure is if he wants to get his stuff.

I guess within the parameters you’ve set, I’d have to say no.

But I’ve used the command prompt and written some simple batch files over the years for work. I just use google to figure out the commands I need.

I haven’t used DOS regularly in 20 years. Give me a few tries; I’ll get it in the end.

This brought up a memory of a book on my desk that my mother saw. She thought it was a novel perhaps and asked “Who’s Ms Dose?”

I lstarted out at MS-DOS 2.something. 3.3 was considerably more flexible. Since then, I’ve done just enough UNIX work to thoroughly muddle my deep long term memory.

This is why I can’t imagine forgetting the basic DOS command set and syntax. I often go into the command prompt in Windows just because some things are easier than with the GUI or else you need to do something that’s actually impossible with the GUI. The command prompt in modern Windows isn’t DOS but it retains the same basic command set and syntax.

I haven’t done it in decades, but back in the day I had to figure out autoexec.bat and config.sys settings on my own. This was when I was like 12. Wanting to play awesome computer games was a pretty good motivator for learning DOS nonsense quickly.

Anyone remember memmaker.exe? That was like easy mode. :smiley:

Could be. Could also be that there’s a directory called SOMEOL~1 containing the file you’re looking for.

I answered it without even looking at the task. But that long filename could be a showstopper–if the system ever had Windows 98 SE on it and was reformatted to FAT32. Then I’d need a Win98 or FreeDOS boot disk to get at the file. I know how to make one, and I do own a working computer that I could plug the 5.25" drive into and go online and get the right disk, but I’d need to leave the room to do that.

But, otherwise, it’s pretty simple.


DIR /S SOMEOL*
CD path	o\SOMEOL~1
DIR A: 
COPY OLDFILE A:

I look for SOMEOL* because that’s as many letters as would be in the 8.3 filename. The third command is to make sure that the 5.25" drive is A:, as well as to make sure there’s no other OLDFILE on it.

And, yes, I’m just kinda showing rather than telling about what I know to do. If I weren’t, I’d probably just DIR /S OLDFILE, in case SOMEOLDSHIT is really something like SMOLDSHT. And I do know enough to just go through and look around if OLDFILE is also the wrong name.

The “C Prompt”? What is this “C Prompt” of which you speak?

I go back to the days when the “A:>” prompt was the only prompt there was! And yes, even with only one floppy disk drive in the machine, and no hard disk, you could copy files from one floppy to another! The COPY command would read a block of data from the source disk, then prompt you to insert the other disk, then write the file there. If the file was large, it might prompt you to switch disks back and forth several times, copying part of the file each time.

The A:> prompt – and actually, a lot of other stuff in DOS – goes back even before there was DOS. A lot of it was outrightly stolen from CP/M, an early operating system (from Digital Research Corp., IIRC), back in the days of the Intel 8080 and the Zilog Z-80. For programmers, even the internals of the DOS operating system were noticeably similar to CP/M.

Of course - pull my smartphone out of my pocket and Google any and all information needed to complete the task.

As a developer, I use a command prompt almost every day. There are still useful tools that are command-line driven.
Not saying that’s necessarily a good thing (and/or those tools are impossible to supplant with GUI versions), just that that’s the reality.

That said, I can’t remember off the top of my head how to search for a specific folder name, so I had to pick option 2.