DOS ain't dead - DOSUTILS, ETHTOOLS, NTOOL, RMENU (was: Advertisement)

j_hoff

12.04.2010, 20:24
(edited by Rugxulo, 14.04.2010, 22:47)

DOSUTILS, ETHTOOLS, NTOOL, RMENU (was: Advertisement) (Announce)

Sorry folks, no hot teenage virgins here and no free SMS-service either ;-)

All i have to offer are a couple of programs i wrote. They are intended to be used under true (MS-)DOS and Robert was so kind to host them. They are organized as four different archives which can be downloaded from here: http://www.bttr-software.de/products/jhoffmann/. A brief presentation can be found there too, more detailed descriptions are enclosed in the respective archives.

Feel free to try these programs and, needless to mention, i would appreciate some feed-back.

Rugxulo

Usono,
14.04.2010, 23:03

@ j_hoff

DOSUTILS, ETHTOOLS, NTOOL, RMENU (was: Advertisement)

Post reply

> Sorry folks, no hot teenage virgins here and no free SMS-service either ;-)

:rotfl:

> All i have to offer are a couple of programs i wrote. They are intended to
> be used under true (MS-)DOS
>
> Feel free to try these programs and, needless to mention, i would
> appreciate some feed-back.

Lacking any packet driver or suitable software (or knowledge to configure it anyways!), I'm only able to look at DOSUTILS.

Archive: dosutils_jhoffmann.zip Length Date Time Name --------- ---------- ----- ---- 8320 01/07/2010 03:13 ASKECHO.COM 8176 01/25/2010 18:34 CGENERR.COM 6928 01/16/2010 12:16 DUMPENV.COM 17472 04/09/2010 21:47 FAM.COM 52 01/25/2010 20:38 GENERR.COM 10912 01/25/2010 21:08 INVOKE.COM 12704 02/06/2010 10:48 PIPESET.COM 12192 01/26/2010 07:13 RPN.COM 22880 01/26/2010 07:06 SELECT.COM 5232 01/13/2010 21:39 TEE.COM 9184 01/06/2010 18:49 TIMESTMP.COM 10320 01/26/2010 07:20 TR.COM --------- ------- 124372 12 files

Quite compact!! With UPX, I can shrink SELECT (by far the biggest in size) to only 12k. Not bad, not bad at all.

SELECT is good for programs that don't handle wildcards (BEFI) or LFNs (e.g. MTFI/8086) by default. The timeout feature is nice.

RPN (< 8k UPX'd) is interesting to me (esp. compared to Befunge), but it has no XOR. No biggie though (can't see why I'd need it although CMD's "set /a" supposedly supports it). Ah, /F is useful (change output format). :-)

PIPESET is cool too, but there are probably other ways of doing that (Rexx, FreeCOM's "set /e", xset) although I admit to never using those much (so far).

Haven't looked too closely at FAM (AWK-ish???) or TR, but they could be useful. To be honest, I never use *nix tr, it always seems easier to use sed. (Not really familiar with AWK yet, but it's pretty powerful and easy.)

The obvious advantages to these tools are the small size and /Evar (set environment variable directly) or fallback /Svar (e.g. NTVDM).

P.S. Somewhat odd choice of license (EUPL), but Wikipedia says it's compatible with GPL2 (and OSI approved it), so I've got no complaints.

---
Know your limits.h

j_hoff

15.04.2010, 22:00

@ Rugxulo

DOSUTILS, ETHTOOLS, NTOOL, RMENU (was: Advertisement)

Post reply

> SELECT is good for programs that don't handle wildcards (BEFI) or LFNs
> (e.g. MTFI/8086) by default. The timeout feature is nice.
I don't quite understand, how SELECT could replace wildcards. I rather see it as a DOS equivalent of the file select box as it is known from WINDOWS. In additon it can be used as general replacement for CHOICE. In some way it is the little cousin of 'menu' known from LINUX/UNIX.

> RPN (< 8k UPX'd) is interesting to me (esp. compared to Befunge), but it
> has no XOR. No biggie though (can't see why I'd need it although CMD's
> "set /a" supposedly supports it). Ah, /F is useful (change output format).
If it were a real problem, it would not be a big deal, to add XOR. Probably the biggest problem would be, to find an unused character for the operator.

> PIPESET is cool too, but there are probably other ways of doing that
> (Rexx, FreeCOM's "set /e", xset) although I admit to never using those
> much (so far).
It's the purpose of all these utlities to add some functionality to a standard DOS shell. I must admit, that i haven't used FreeCOM's "set /e" yet, but i assume, that PIPESET is much more powerfull, as it is combined with a kind of "find" feature. This allows to read a distinct part of another program's output into an environment variable.
Try DIR | SELECT /S free ==Byte ==free (the precise wording and spelling may vary, according to the Dos version). It should set the environment variable named "free" with the amount of free space reported fom dir. Would "set /e" be able to do this?

> Haven't looked too closely at FAM (AWK-ish???) or TR, but they could be
> useful. To be honest, I never use *nix tr, it always seems easier to use
> sed. (Not really familiar with AWK yet, but it's pretty powerful and
> easy.)
Well AWK-ish in a very broad sense. It was, like many of these tools, inspired by UNIX programs but it is definitely not a port of any of these programs. It's rather a combination of 'read' and 'cut' with some elements of 'tr' and 'awk'.

> P.S. Somewhat odd choice of license (EUPL), but Wikipedia says it's
> compatible with GPL2 (and OSI approved it), so I've got no complaints.
Well, it might look odd when seen from the US. And it's not only Wikipedia that says it's compatible with GPL2, the EUPL itself explicitly states in its appendix the GNU GPL v.2 as a compatible license.

By the way . . . what is "upx"?

Rugxulo

Usono,
15.04.2010, 22:30

@ j_hoff

DOSUTILS, ETHTOOLS, NTOOL, RMENU (was: Advertisement)

Post reply

> > SELECT is good for programs that don't handle wildcards (BEFI) or LFNs
> > (e.g. MTFI/8086) by default. The timeout feature is nice.
> I don't quite understand, how SELECT could replace wildcards.

You're right, I just meant sometimes I use wildcards to avoid typing a complete filename, and most tools don't handle that correctly. At least this way you have a choice of what file to use (instead of assuming first one found).

> > RPN (< 8k UPX'd) is interesting to me (esp. compared to Befunge), but
> it
> > has no XOR. No biggie though (can't see why I'd need it although CMD's
> > "set /a" supposedly supports it). Ah, /F is useful (change output
> format).
> If it were a real problem, it would not be a big deal, to add XOR.
> Probably the biggest problem would be, to find an unused character for the
> operator.

It's not a problem. Like I said, I can't think of any reason to need it. However, it appears "#" is free to use. ;-)

EDIT: Not sure if /R? use of "#" conflicts, so perhaps "@"? (I know, horribly random choice, but I think Rexx uses "||" for concatinating strings, so it has to use "&&" as XOR !!)

> > PIPESET is cool too, but there are probably other ways of doing that
> > (Rexx, FreeCOM's "set /e", xset) although I admit to never using those
> > much (so far).
> It's the purpose of all these utlities to add some functionality to a
> standard DOS shell.

Right, I know, and it's good that it doesn't overcomplicate things. I too prefer standard tools, if at all possible.

> I must admit, that i haven't used
> FreeCOM's "set /e" yet, but i assume, that PIPESET is much more powerfull,
> as it is combined with a kind of "find" feature. This allows to read a
> distinct part of another program's output into an environment variable.

I just meant that various solutions to similar problems exist, of varying degrees of usefulness. Yes, PIPESET is more powerful, I just wanted to list some others for (hypothetical) comparison.

> > P.S. Somewhat odd choice of license (EUPL), but Wikipedia says it's
> > compatible with GPL2 (and OSI approved it), so I've got no complaints.
> Well, it might look odd when seen from the US.

There are a billion licenses already, so that's all. But the "good thing" seems to be that it's available in all (29?) EU languages. (GPL pretty much seems to imply that only English is legally checked rigorously.)

> And it's not only Wikipedia
> that says it's compatible with GPL2, the EUPL itself explicitly states in
> its appendix the GNU GPL v.2 as a compatible license.

Yeah, PDF might not be the best format to have a license text, IMHO.

> By the way . . . what is "upx"?

http://upx.sf.net

> UPX is a free, portable, extendable, high-performance executable
> packer for several different executable formats. It achieves an
> excellent compression ratio and offers very fast decompression.
> Your executables suffer no memory overhead or other drawbacks
> for most of the formats supported, because of in-place decompression.

---
Know your limits.h

j_hoff

25.05.2010, 21:18

@ j_hoff

DOSUTILS, ETHTOOLS, NTOOL, RMENU (was: Advertisement)

Post reply

I just want to announce that a new version of my DOSUTILS package is available. It is a collection of utilities which can help in writing batch procedures under true (MS-)DOS and can be downloaded from http://www.bttr-software.de/products/jhoffmann/ together with the following three other packages: ETHTOOL a set of utilities for ethernet network analysis, NTOOL an incarnation of netcat, also known as "the swiss army knife" of TCP/IP networking and RMENU which is "kind of" a telnet server for (MS-)DOS.

All these programs may or may not be useful to you, but you will only know that for shure, if you try them and see yourself. Needless to say, that i still apreciate feed-back.