Welcome to Andy's little DOS help file!

DOS is a very simple operating system. For your purposes, you can probably think of it as a variation of a Linux shell in a terminal window.

Here is what some dos prompts look like:
C:\>
C:\WINDOWS>
K:\AISTUFF>

The letters before the ":" are drive letters. A: and B: are floppy drives, C: is usually the hard drive, and D:, E:, and F: are often CD drives, Zip drives, etc. Anything past G: is probably a network drive. At Carleton, K: is your FABIO account. At the prompt, after the drive letter, you see the directory that you are in.

Navigating the file system in DOS is similar to Linux. To change drives, you will need to type in the drive letter followed by a colon (:). To change directories, you simply do it in the same way as Linux, except use a backslash \ instead of a forward slash /.
For example, if I changed drives to K: and then went into a directory called AISTUFF, my screen would look like this:

C:\WINDOWS>K: K:\>cd aistuff K:\AISTUFF>

Note the lack of case sensitivity in DOS.

There also is no built-in command history in DOS. There is a program that comes with Windows, however, called DOSKEY that will let you get command history by pressing the up arrow (a la Linux). To run it:

K:\AISTUFF>doskey DOSKEY installed

Now you can hit the up arrow to see your previous commands. Try it!

To list files in DOS, use the command "dir". You can also try "dir /w" to give you ls-like output.

09/28/2006  02:17 PM    <DIR>          .
09/27/2006  08:21 AM    <DIR>          ..
09/22/2006  09:57 AM             4,392 VacuumBot.java
09/22/2006  09:57 AM               555 Agent.java
09/22/2006  09:57 AM             1,497 Calibration.java

Here's a list of some other Linux commands and their DOS equivalents:

Linux	DOS
cp picture.jpg ./stuff/mypics/	copy picture.jpg .\stuff\mypics
mv thing.cpp /tmp/	move thing.cpp c:\temp
mv oldname.tff newname.tff	ren oldname.tff newname.tff
rm badfile.txt	del badfile.txt
rm -r baddir	deltree baddir
mkdir newdir	md newdir
cat textfile.txt	type textfile.txt

Written by Andy Exley.
Edited by Dave Musicant.