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). It is usually located in the C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND directory. To run it:

K:\AISTUFF>c:\windows\command\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.

K:\AISTUFF>dir

 Volume in drive C is PURPLE
 Volume Serial Number is 3D2C-3017
 Directory of K:\AISTUFF

.              <DIR>        11-21-02  2:36p .
..             <DIR>        11-21-02  2:36p ..
VACUUM~1 JAV         3,602  12-03-02  2:13p VacuumBot.java
VACUUM~1 CLA           859  12-03-02  2:08p VacuumBot$1.class
VACUUM~2 CLA         2,530  12-03-02  2:08p VacuumBot.class
AGENT~1  CLA           577  12-03-02  2:08p Agent.class
AGENT~1  JAV           402  12-03-02  2:10p Agent.java
         5 file(s)          7,970 bytes
         2 dir(s)       17,868.11 MB free

K:\AISTUFF>

Hey! What's with all this tildes on the left? That's not what I called my file!
You're seeing some ugly side effects of combining a filesystem that supports long file names (Windows filesystem) and a file system that only supports eight character file names (DOS). If you are using DOS in a shell in Windows, you can refer to the file by its long name. So VACUUM~1.JAV and VacuumBot.java are the same file.

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.