Bit of a historical question: MS-DOS
 

I've been trying to remember this, and I honestly can't remember it
anymore. In MS-DOS, where were the standard external commands located?
The only thing I remember about MS-DOS was that the command.com was
located in the root directory (along with autoexec.bat, config.sys, and
the hidden files msdos.sys & io.sys). Slightly different names for the
PC-DOS version, such as pcdos.sys & ibmio.sys, but otherwise identical.
The standard external commands were those like chkdsk or xcopy, which
weren't built into the command.com. Was there an MSDOS folder or
something which contained these commands?

Yousuf Khan

Bit of a historical question: MS-DOS
 

From: "Yousuf Khan"

I've been trying to remember this, and I honestly can't remember it anymore. In MS-DOS,
where were the standard external commands located? The only thing I remember about
MS-DOS was that the command.com was located in the root directory (along with
autoexec.bat, config.sys, and the hidden files msdos.sys & io.sys). Slightly different
names for the PC-DOS version, such as pcdos.sys & ibmio.sys, but otherwise identical.
The standard external commands were those like chkdsk or xcopy, which weren't built into
the command.com. Was there an MSDOS folder or something which contained these commands?

Yousuf Khan

It depended upon the DOS falvour; PC/MS/DR.

However it was always located in the PATH (%PATH%).


--
Dave
Multi-AV Scanning Tool - http://multi-av.thespykiller.co.uk
http://www.pctipp.ch/downloads/dl/35905.asp

Bit of a historical question: MS-DOS
 

David H. Lipman wrote:
From: "Yousuf Khan"

I've been trying to remember this, and I honestly can't remember it anymore. In MS-DOS,
where were the standard external commands located? The only thing I remember about
MS-DOS was that the command.com was located in the root directory (along with
autoexec.bat, config.sys, and the hidden files msdos.sys & io.sys). Slightly different
names for the PC-DOS version, such as pcdos.sys & ibmio.sys, but otherwise identical.
The standard external commands were those like chkdsk or xcopy, which weren't built into
the command.com. Was there an MSDOS folder or something which contained these commands?

Yousuf Khan

It depended upon the DOS falvour; PC/MS/DR.

However it was always located in the PATH (%PATH%).


I normally kept mine in the C:\DOS directory, and made sure both it and
C:\$PROGDIR for all the programs were in the path. As long as all the
program locations were in the path, it didn't really matter where they were.

On a Toshiba laptop I had with DOS 3.3 in ROM when first booted from
new, it showed all the DOS commands in C:\, with everything else on D:\,
which was the Hard Drive, and the path was set to include D:\ by
default. This worked fine until you found a program which was hard coded
only to run from the C: drive, then I had to copy the contents of the
ROM onto the HD, and disable the ROM in the BIOS, losing about half a
megabyte of the 10 megabyte HD. I've still got the Toshiba DOS 6.xx
extensions on floppy somewhere, along with install floppies for all
MS-DOS versions except DOS 4.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.

Bit of a historical question: MS-DOS
 

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
...
I've been trying to remember this, and I honestly can't remember it
anymore. In MS-DOS, where were the standard external commands located?
The only thing I remember about MS-DOS was that the command.com was
located in the root directory (along with autoexec.bat, config.sys,
and the hidden files msdos.sys & io.sys). Slightly different names for
the PC-DOS version, such as pcdos.sys & ibmio.sys, but otherwise
identical. The standard external commands were those like chkdsk or
xcopy, which weren't built into the command.com. Was there an MSDOS
folder or something which contained these commands?

Yousuf Khan

As I recall, the default location for MS-DOS (at least v. 5 and 6.x) was
at C:\DOS
--
Glen Ventura
MS MVP Oct. 2002 - Sept. 2009
CompTIA A+

Bit of a historical question: MS-DOS
 

Yousuf Khan wrote:

I've been trying to remember this, and I honestly can't remember it
anymore. In MS-DOS, where were the standard external commands located?
The only thing I remember about MS-DOS was that the command.com was
located in the root directory (along with autoexec.bat, config.sys, and
the hidden files msdos.sys & io.sys). Slightly different names for the
PC-DOS version, such as pcdos.sys & ibmio.sys, but otherwise identical.
The standard external commands were those like chkdsk or xcopy, which
weren't built into the command.com. Was there an MSDOS folder or
something which contained these commands?

Before there was a hard drive (and using 5 1/4" floppies for instance),
the external commands were on the floppy disk, Yousuf. If you needed
one of those commands you had to have the floppy in the drive.

The internal commands were in memory and available without the floppy in
the drive. They were loaded at boot up time.

If you had two floppy drives and wanted to do a diskcopy from A: to B:
you had to have the DOS floppy inserted in a drive (A: was convenient
because you could dispense with the path because you had booted up from
A: and A: was part of the prompt), and execute diskcopy A: B: and the
command (now copied into memory) would pause to allow removing the DOS
floppy and inserting a floppy into A: (and B: for that matter).

Those, of course, were the good old days.

TomT

Bit of a historical question: MS-DOS
 

On Fri, 1 Jun 2012 17:26:07 -0400, "glee"
wrote:

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
...
I've been trying to remember this, and I honestly can't remember it
anymore. In MS-DOS, where were the standard external commands located?
The only thing I remember about MS-DOS was that the command.com was
located in the root directory (along with autoexec.bat, config.sys,
and the hidden files msdos.sys & io.sys). Slightly different names for
the PC-DOS version, such as pcdos.sys & ibmio.sys, but otherwise
identical. The standard external commands were those like chkdsk or
xcopy, which weren't built into the command.com. Was there an MSDOS
folder or something which contained these commands?

Yousuf Khan

As I recall, the default location for MS-DOS (at least v. 5 and 6.x) was
at C:\DOS


That's what I remember too, but at my age, I don't trust my memory g

Bit of a historical question: MS-DOS
 

"Ken Blake" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 1 Jun 2012 17:26:07 -0400, "glee"
wrote:

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
...
I've been trying to remember this, and I honestly can't remember it
anymore. In MS-DOS, where were the standard external commands
located?
The only thing I remember about MS-DOS was that the command.com was
located in the root directory (along with autoexec.bat, config.sys,
and the hidden files msdos.sys & io.sys). Slightly different names
for
the PC-DOS version, such as pcdos.sys & ibmio.sys, but otherwise
identical. The standard external commands were those like chkdsk or
xcopy, which weren't built into the command.com. Was there an MSDOS
folder or something which contained these commands?

Yousuf Khan

As I recall, the default location for MS-DOS (at least v. 5 and 6.x)
was
at C:\DOS


That's what I remember too, but at my age, I don't trust my memory g

yes, well with MS-DOS, you need less memory anyway... lol

Bit of a historical question: MS-DOS
 

On Fri, 1 Jun 2012 20:55:33 -0400, "glee"
wrote:

"Ken Blake" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 1 Jun 2012 17:26:07 -0400, "glee"
wrote:

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
...
I've been trying to remember this, and I honestly can't remember it
anymore. In MS-DOS, where were the standard external commands
located?
The only thing I remember about MS-DOS was that the command.com was
located in the root directory (along with autoexec.bat, config.sys,
and the hidden files msdos.sys & io.sys). Slightly different names
for
the PC-DOS version, such as pcdos.sys & ibmio.sys, but otherwise
identical. The standard external commands were those like chkdsk or
xcopy, which weren't built into the command.com. Was there an MSDOS
folder or something which contained these commands?

Yousuf Khan

As I recall, the default location for MS-DOS (at least v. 5 and 6.x)
was
at C:\DOS


That's what I remember too, but at my age, I don't trust my memory g

yes, well with MS-DOS, you need less memory anyway... lol


LOL from me too. I'm in the minority, but I love puns.

Bit of a historical question: MS-DOS
 

On 01/06/2012 4:57 PM, David H. Lipman wrote:
From: "Yousuf

I've been trying to remember this, and I honestly can't remember it anymore. In MS-DOS,
where were the standard external commands located? The only thing I remember about
MS-DOS was that the command.com was located in the root directory (along with
autoexec.bat, config.sys, and the hidden files msdos.sys& io.sys). Slightly different
names for the PC-DOS version, such as pcdos.sys& ibmio.sys, but otherwise identical.
The standard external commands were those like chkdsk or xcopy, which weren't built into
the command.com. Was there an MSDOS folder or something which contained these commands?

Yousuf Khan

It depended upon the DOS falvour; PC/MS/DR.

However it was always located in the PATH (%PATH%).

Yeah, I know it was always available in the path, but was there a
default directory created to hold these commands? For some reason I'm
thinking that there may have been a C:\SYS or SYSTEM folder or
something? Or were they all placed into C:\ the root directory?

Yousuf Khan

Bit of a historical question: MS-DOS
 

TomT wrote:

Yousuf Khan wrote:

I've been trying to remember this, and I honestly can't remember it
anymore. In MS-DOS, where were the standard external commands located?
The only thing I remember about MS-DOS was that the command.com was
located in the root directory (along with autoexec.bat, config.sys, and
the hidden files msdos.sys & io.sys). Slightly different names for the
PC-DOS version, such as pcdos.sys & ibmio.sys, but otherwise identical.
The standard external commands were those like chkdsk or xcopy, which
weren't built into the command.com. Was there an MSDOS folder or
something which contained these commands?

Before there was a hard drive (and using 5 1/4" floppies for instance),
the external commands were on the floppy disk, Yousuf. If you needed
one of those commands you had to have the floppy in the drive.

The internal commands were in memory and available without the floppy in
the drive. They were loaded at boot up time.

They had to originate from somewhere. Since you were using the command-
line interpreter (command.com), the internal commands were inside the
command-line interpreter (cd, rd, copy, pause, etc). So, yes, they were
in memory because nothing runs unless it is in memory but they were not
separate processes. They were inside the command.com process that was
loaded into memory. They are called internal commands because they are
defined internally in command.com.

Internal commands (do not reside separately, are inside of command.com):
break
call
chcp
cd or chdir
cls
copy
ctty
date
del or erase
dir
echo
exit
for
goto
if
lh or loadhigh
md or mkdir
path
pause
prompt
rem (only useful inside a batch file)
ren or rename
rd or rmdir
set
shift
time
type
ver
verify
vol

External commands (in a separate executable image file):
ansi.sys
append
assign
attrib
backup
basic (Gates & Allen original product sold to hobbyists)
basica
chkdsk
choice
command.com (see above for its internal functions)
comp
dblspace
debug
defrag
deloldos
deltree
diskcomp
diskcopy
doskey
dosshell
drvspace
edit
edlin
emm386
exe2bin
expand
extract
fasthelp
fastopen
fc
fdisk
find
format
graftable
graphics
help
interlnk
intersvr
join
keyb
label
loadfix
mem
memmaker
mirror
mode
more
move
mscdex
msbackup
msd
nlsfunc
pcpark
power
print
qbasic
recover
replace
restore
scandisk
setver
share
smartdrv
sort
start
subst
sys
tree
undelete
unformat
xcopy
xcopy32

This is not a comprhensive list. I'm sure that I missed some. Not all
of the above internal/external commands are available in all versions of
MS-DOS. This is a compendium of commands available across all versions
of MS-DOS.

There are commands available in OS/2 that were not available in MS-DOS
or PC-DOS. The above list does not include non-Microsoft or non-IBM
flavors, like DR-DOS (aka Concurrent PC-DOS, Novell DOS, Caldera
OpenDOS, etc) or FreeDOS (aka PD-DOS); however, Yousuf specifically
asked only about MS-DOS. Depending on how far back Yousuf wants to go,
MS-DOS 1.0 came from Gates buying Seattle Computer's QDOS (Quick and
Dirty Operating System). Seattle Computer was allowed to separately
market their separate code branch as Seattle DOS (I don't have a list of
internal and external commands for that OS). Yousuf never bothered to
say WHICH version of MS-DOS in which he was interested.

Also remember that Windows 9x was a *******ized arrangment of MS-DOS
16-bit kernel and Windows GUI/API & 32-bit kernel. There was a separate
MS-DOS available in Win 9x/ME. You could literally exit the Win9x GUI
and drop back into a real DOS-mode command-line interpreter (aka DOS
shell).

Default folders for external commands:
MS-DOS 7 (Win9x): %windir%\COMMAND
MS-DOS pre-7: C:\DOS
MS-DOS pre-2.0: C: (since support for directories was added in 2.0)