This whole File Search Utility thread has gotten me thinking about DOS programming. I program mainly in either Win32 C++ for apps or Perl for scripts. However, I've played around with DOS C programming from time to time, and would like some 'real-world exercises', so to speak.
So, is there a list of FreeDOS Utilities that need tweaking, or utilities that just don't exist? Whether they be MS-alikes, GNU-alikes, or something completely different?
Jay, if you find it interesting I'd like to request for a utility which scans a dump of the bootsector for filenames and checks if they exist. The dump (a file on disk, exact duplicate of the bootsector) is 512 bytes long.
you can generate an artificial one using the following command when using FreeDOS SYS (in the KERNEL 2034 package): SYS A: A: C:\BOOTSECT.BIN BOOTONLY which creates a bootsector intended for disk A:, but instead of writing it to disk A:, writes it to file C:\BOOTSECT.BIN there are also some Bootsector-dumping utilities like SAVEBS-A (from www.auersoft.org), and COPYBS (from syslinux.zytor.org) which could then be applied to a Win98 bootdisk from www.bootdisk.com for example.
the challenge lies in analyzing what exactly a valid filename is. (minimum and maximum length, valid characters, valid sequence of characters, etc) a freedos bootsector for example refers to KERNEL__SYS and thus file KERNEL.SYS must exist on disk ( _ are spaces, unused). for Win98 bootsectors it might be more difficult, as they might not use all space (IOSYS instead of IO______SYS).
another challenge might be to check 4KB blocks of upper memory if they can be used for EMM386, just like UMBPCI (specifically: the UMBCHK program) does. current EMM386 sticks to 16KB blocks, current UMBCHK also, UMBPCI can use 4KB blocks, but I'd like to find out which 4KB blocks :)
I myself stick with batchfile programming. Results of that are in the FreeDOS distribution.
Bernd
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