Greetings, Folks.
Ralf > First time I hear about those programs, and they are not
something elementary to (Free)DOS,
Jiri > All this is essentially for people who already know what's
there or what should be there, not really for novices.
I respectfully disagree. -smile-
The first thing a new user will see when FreeDOS boots, is the message
"Type HELP to get support on commands and navigation". When one types
HELP, the first line of the Main Help page says "For information on
using Help, press F1...". When F1 is pressed, the How to use the
FreeDOS Help page is displayed, and this pages mentions WHATIS and
APROPOS.
So after learning the HELP command, the next two commands a new user
will learn are WHATIS and APROPOS. And they don't work! It gets even
worse: the same Help page also mentions FASTHELP, FDHELP, and
FSUITE04. And these don't work either!
Now for an experienced user this is not a big issue, I agree, but for
a new user this might just be enough to quit and never look a FreeDOS
again. And that would be a shame.
To be sure, I consider myself an experienced user, but when I dir into
FDOS\BIN and see those 316 different entries, there's a whole lot of
software in there that absolutely don't know about. A simple WHATIS
CWSDSTUB would make my life much easier.
Obviously, I could write a WHATIS.BAT myself, and store it in
FDOS\LINKS, which is in the path. Something like:
@if exist \FDOS\APPINFO\%1.LSM HEAD -N 5 \FDOS\APPINFO\%1.LSM
Not so pretty, but it works, and it's only 62 bytes.
But my point is, this is mentioned in the Help pages, so these
programs did once exist, and I can't image why someone would remove
them purposefully. In other words, I think this is a little bug, and
if needed, I can download an investigate earlier versions and see if I
can find these programs and add them, but that would only solve *my*
problem, and so I felt it was worth mentioning.
Take care,
Simon
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