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The Prompt Solution - Online Edition
JP Software's Electronic Newsletter
Issue #5 - July 2, 2002
>> Special summer pricing on CD upgrades -- including a special
>> "second license free" offer! To order go direct to our online
>> store at http://jpsoft.com/store/store.mv. See below for
>> complete details, tech tips, and more!
[Sent to the address you gave us when you purchased a JP Software
product. For address changes and list removal see end of message.]
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In this Issue:
* Summer Specials
- Upgrade to the JP CD Suite -- Get a FREE Second License!
- Tell Your Friends -- New CD Suite Purchases Get a FREE
Second License too!
* Latest Versions of 4DOS, 4NT, and Take Command/32
- What? You Missed the Upgrade?? ... Newest Releases Offer
FTP Support, and Over 200 Other Enhancements
- Latest Maintenance Releases
* Tech Tips:
- Understanding File Systems: Something Old, Something New
- Command Line Features You Forgot
* Customer Service and Miscellaneous
- Contacting JP Software
- Newsletter Address Correction, List Removal, and
Privacy Information
- Copyrights, Trademarks, and Fine Print
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**>> Summer Specials <<**
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>> Upgrade to the JP CD Suite -- Get a FREE Second License!
Already own 4DOS, 4NT, or Take Command/32? Now you can move up to our
JP CD Suite with all three products for just $59.95 -- that's $10
under the regular upgrade price -- AND we'll throw in a second CD
license at the same time, at no additional charge!
We know many of you now use more than one computer -- for work and
home, for your children's education, as a network gateway, and more.
This is the perfect opportunity to build in consistency and ease of
maintenance across all your machines, at a very attractive price.
If you don't need a second license for another system, you can save
it, pass it on to a friend, or even give it to your boss (just let us
know who it's going to when you order).
Using more than two systems yourself? We can help there too -- if
you're taking advantage of the offer above for your own computers you
can add on CD licenses for more systems (up to a total of 10), at just
$39.95 additional per seat. That's over 20% off our usual
multi-system CD pricing!
To order just visit our online store at:
http://jpsoft.com/store/store.mv
This special offer expires August 31, 2002, so act now!
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>> Tell Your Friends -- New CD Suite Purchases Get a
>> FREE Second License too!
We're happy to extend the benefits of this offer to new customers too!
From now through August 31, when you order a new CD Suite you'll get a
second license FREE as well!
Need more beyond the second license? Already own the CD Suite? Take
advantage of the same offer mentioned above: go up to a total of 10
machines at just $39.95 additional per seat.
This offer also expires August 31, and is available through our online
store at http://jpsoft.com/store/store.mv.
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**>> Latest Versions of 4DOS, 4NT, and Take Command/32 <<**
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>> What? You Missed the Upgrade??
Newest Releases Offer FTP Support - and Over 200 Other Enhancements
If you're still on 4DOS 6.02 (or below), 4NT 3.02, or Take Command/32
2.02 -- or any earlier versions -- then perhaps you missed last year's
major upgrades. Well, they're still available -- and at the same low
price. Here are some highlights ...
FTP Support:
The single biggest enhancement in these versions is FTP
support (in 4NT and Take Command). This support extends
across many commands and functions (e.g. you can use most file
oriented commands -- COPY, DEL, MOVE, REN, TYPE, etc. -- on
FTP servers). It enables file management on FTP servers from
the command line, and brings all of the capabilities of 4NT
and Take Command/32's enhanced batch scripting language to
automation of FTP transfers. It's an important tool for web
developers, and anyone maintaining a web or FTP server and
needing to manage it using familiar commands, and/or automate
their work. See the first "Tech Tip" below for details on how
to use these features.
@file Lists:
Another significant addition, "@file" lists, adds even more
flexibility to file processing, allowing you to take a list of
files generated by another command, or another application,
and use it as input to any file processing command. Use @file
lists to find text in files and then process only those files
containing the matching text, to change the order in which
files are copied or moved, or use the same file lists for
internal commands and external applications with similar
features (e.g. .ZIP file tools). See the second "Tech Tip"
below for more information.
Usability Improvements:
We've also added plenty of little things that help with
usability - like server and sharename completion on the
command line, variable name completion, a more robust way to
handle standard text-mode applications in Take Command/32, and
dozens more. And there are over 100 enhancements to existing
commands, giving you more command line power and flexibility
than ever.
Batch File Enhancements:
For batch programmers, this release offers a wide range of
additional enhancements, including over 40 new variables and
functions that offer capabilities like manipulation of the
Windows registry, access to Windows system data, new
arithmetic calculations, additional date handling, and access
to new Windows 2000 file attributes.
In addition all products are fully compatible with the latest
operating systems including Windows NT / 2000 / XP and Windows 95 /98
/ ME.
The price for all this? Just $34.95 for the first product, $19.95 for
each additional product, or $54.95 for the JP CD Suite. Plus if you
currently have one or more individual products you can convert to the
CD Suite with all products for just $69.95!
For additional details see the "What's New" section of the online help
for each product. A file with essentially the entire list of changes
is also available -- check the ASCII files area of our web site at
http://jpsoft.com/ for WHATSNEW.TXT.
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>> Latest Maintenance Releases
The latest releases of our most popular command line tools are 4DOS
7.01, 4NT 4.01, and Take Command/32 3.01. Earlier this year we also
released a maintenance upgrade to 4OS2, version 3.03.
To download these latest releases, visit:
* Our web site at http://jpsoft.com/
* Our FTP site at ftp.jpsoft.com. See the product subdirectories
for the file for each product (these are the same files
available from our web page).
This maintenance release includes bug fixes and compatibility
enhancements developed since our last release. It does not include
any major new features or functions. For complete details on all
changes see the "What's New" topic in the online help, or the
same information available from the Technical Support area of our web
page.
If you are currently running 4DOS 7.00, 4NT 4.00, or Take Command/32
3.00, this is a minor upgrade. To update your current copy, simply
download the new version and install in a new directory (or over the
old one if you wish). For manual installation, see the brief
instructions in README.TXT and/or the more detailed instructions in
the ASCII Introduction and Installation Guide (included with the
downloaded files).
If this is a major upgrade for you (e.g. if you are running 4DOS 6.02,
4NT 3.02, or Take Command/32 2.02, and have not yet upgraded) please
see the previous article.
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**>> Tech Tips <<**
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>> Understanding File Systems: Something Old, Something New
Remember the good -- or, depending on your view, bad -- old days? A 20
MB hard disk was large, and file names were 8 letters or numbers
followed by an extension of three more. File systems were barely
mentioned because there was only one, and of course pretty much all work
on PCs was done in DOS and from the command line!
Things are a little different now. Some people don't even know what
the command line is. 20 MB is more like a file size than a disk
size. And you have to make sense of a plethora of file systems --
FAT, VFAT, CDFS, NTFS, NFS, and more. What's more, each has its own
unique characteristics and many are not compatible with each other.
4DOS, 4NT, and Take Command can work with pretty much any file system
that's provided on the platforms they run on. However there are real
differences in behavior that depend on both the operating system and
the file system. Understanding these differences is important if you
work on multiple platforms, or with multiple file systems, as many
people do.
The operating systems under which our products run support four
standard file systems: FAT, VFAT, FAT32, and NTFS.
* The FAT File System is the traditional file system used by all
versions of DOS. Its name comes from the File Allocation Table
DOS uses to keep track of the space allocated to each file.
Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, and XP also support the FAT file
system.
* The VFAT File System is an extension of the FAT file system
available in Windows 95 and above. This system maintains
additional information about files on FAT drives, including long
filenames (LFNs).
* The FAT32 File System is an additional extension to the VFAT file
system. It is available in Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2
("OEMSR2"), and in Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP. It is similar
to VFAT, but supports larger disk drives. It is not supported
under Windows NT 4.0 or earlier, or under DOS.
* The Windows NT File System or NTFS is a file system provided with
all versions of Windows NT / 2000 / XP. It is not an extension
of any of the FAT-based systems, and instead uses a new design to
support long file names and to offer improved performance and
support for large drives.
In addition, you probably have access to one or more file systems
which are on other computers accessed across a network. Those file
systems may be any of the ones listed above -- or may be completely
different systems such as Unix, VMS, or Netware file systems, whose
rules and functions are quite different from the systems you are used
to under DOS and Windows.
The remainder of this article discusses some of the issues you can
run into when working with a range of file systems, and how features
of 4DOS, 4NT, and Take Command can help.
File Names
Often the most obvious difference between file systems is in the names
allowed. FAT systems support only traditional "8.3" names -- those
with an 8-character name and a 3-character extension, all in upper
case. All of the other common systems allow longer file names,
usually up to about 255 characters.
If you are using a system which supports long filenames you can
convert between the long and short names while typing at the command
line, or programmatically in a command or batch file. To convert
while typing, type part of the name you want, then press Tab until the
file name has been filled in. Normally this will display the long
filename; to see the short name instead, press Ctrl-A. Press Ctrl-A
again to toggle back to the long name. This feature allows you to,
for example, display the long name of a file and then switch to the
short name in order to pass it to an older program which does not
handle long filenames.
In any command or batch file you can also use the @SFN and @LFN
functions to perform these conversions, for example:
c:\>echo %@sfn["My Documents"]
C:\MYDOCU~1
c:\>echo %@lfn[MYDOCU~1]
C:\My Documents
In addition the characters allowed in file names vary from system to
system. A complete discussion of the characters allowed is beyond our
scope here, but on FAT systems you can use alphabetic and numeric
characters plus the punctuation marks ! # $ % & ' ( ) - @ ^ _ ` { }
and ~ in both the name and the extension of a file. Other
Windows-based file systems may allow additional characters, though
non-Windows systems tend to be more restrictive.
Because the exclamation point [!], percent sign [%], caret [^], at
sign [@], parentheses [()], and back-quote [`] also have other
meanings to 4DOS, 4NT, and Take Command, it is best to avoid using
them in filenames. If you do find filenames with these characters in
them there are several ways to handle them. Here are some examples:
* For the % sign, use two -- to delete the file named my%file:
del my%%file
* Use the escape character ("%=") to remove the usual special
meaning of the next character:
del my%=%file
* Place backquotes around the filename to prevent special
characters from being processed when the command is first
examined:
del `my%file`
* Use SETDOS /X to disable the special meaning of certain
characters (e.g. the backquote, or the command separator
character). See SETDOS /X for additional details.
* Use a wildcard character in brackets if there is no other file
name it will match; this command will delete all files whose
name is "my", then any single character, then "file":
del my[?]file
The last two methods will only work for internal commands. The others
will generally work for external commands as well. The last method --
using [?] -- is the most robust and easiest, but can be dangerous if
you have other similarly named files as it can match more than one
filename.
Upper and Lower Case
All of the DOS and Windows file systems described above (except the
original FAT system) are "case-retentive", meaning they remember
filenames as they were created with both upper and lower case letters.
However they are also "case-insensitive", meaning that you can refer
to the file MyFile as MYFILE or myfile or MyFile, all are equivalent.
For this reason you will not usually have to modify or deal with the
case of filenames under these systems.
Network file systems, on the other hand, particularly those running
under Unix, are often case-sensitive -- that is, MyFile, MYFILE, and
myfile all refer to different files. When accessing these systems you
may want to take some steps to make sure you are using the correct
file names. Here are some areas where this can affect you:
DIR: Don't use the /E or /L switches when displaying directories
for case-sensitive file systems. These switches force the DIR
output to upper or lower case, which will prevent DIR from
displaying the true names of the files.
COPY, MD, MOVE, RD, REN, etc.: Commands which handle files or
directories must be given the correct name, including upper and
lower case characters, or they will not be able to find the file.
The same applies to variable functions.
When copying or moving files to case-sensitive file systems you
may need to force the case to be what you want. For example,
this command will copy the file JANDATA.ZIP to an FTP site using
4NT or Take Command/32's FTP features, and store it with an upper
case name on the target file system:
copy JANDATA.ZIP "ftp://ftp.somesite.com/"
In most cases you will want such an operation to convert the
filename to lower case, rather than making assumptions about how
it will be transferred. You can do this explicitly:
copy JANDATA.ZIP "ftp://ftp.somesite.com/jandata.zip"
Or if you do it frequently, you can set up an alias. This
example copies the file to a named FTP site, and forces the name
to lower case (the FOR command is used to allow wildcard file
names). Be sure to enter the alias on one line:
alias lcopy `for %file in (%1) copy %file
"ftp://%2/%@lower[%file]"`
To use this alias:
lcopy JANDATA.ZIP ftp.somesite.com
International Issues
One area that causes a lot of confusion is the use of "international"
(non-English) characters in filenames.
Under the FAT-based file systems you will generally find that any
legal character from the 255-character extended ASCII set that you can
enter on your keyboard can be used in a filename and will be stored
and retrieved properly. Your online help lists these characters under
"Reference Information" in the "ASCII and Key Codes" topics.
However, when using Windows NT's NTFS file system, which supports the
use of "Unicode" in filenames to handle a wider range of characters,
the issue is far more complex. Windows will convert any characters
you enter to Unicode prior to storing them as part of the filename,
and will convert them back to ASCII when retrieving them for
non-Unicode programs like 4NT and Take Command.
This conversion is "symmetric" for standard English-language
characters, so the character you type for the filename is the one you
will see in directories and can use in file processing commands and
functions. However for non-English characters the conversion
performed by Windows unfortunately is not symmetric, so that if you
(for example) enter an "o" with a German "umlaut" over it in a
filename, the character may appear completely different when displayed
in a DIR, and may not match properly when used to manipulate the file.
This problem does not affect all non-English characters, only some of
them; occurs only on NTFS drives; and is less likely to cause trouble
in Take Command than in 4NT; nevertheless, it can be quite confusing
when it does happen.
At this time the only easy solution to this problem is to use
the [?] wildcard for the character in question, for example:
ren dankesch[?]n dankeschon
Note that this will also attempt to rename other matching files with
similar names, and any character in the next to last position. (A
future version of 4NT and Take Command may provide Unicode support to
address this issue, but development plans for such a version are still
under discussion and are not final at this time.)
Other Issues
There are a number of other issues where file systems differ which we
don't have room to go into in detail here, but we can give you a brief
"heads-up" on some areas you should be aware of:
- Under Windows 2000 and XP, NTFS drives can store a range of extra
file "attributes" such as "temporary" or "offline". These are
not available in FAT-based systems, nor on NTFS pre-Windows 2000.
See the online help for details.
- Translations between file attributes on different operating
systems are not usually reliable. In particular, there is no
clear way to map Unix file permissions to DOS and Windows file
attributes, and attempts to manipulate permissions on Unix
systems through a network using 4DOS, 4NT, or Take Command are
likely to fail completely, or yield incorrect results. To
address this use a Unix-based tool or stand-alone FTP software to
change the Unix permissions.
- Not all file systems correctly identify themselves or their
characteristics when working in a network environment. In
particular, the file system on another machine may appear to
support long filenames when it does not. Similarly, a directory
may appear to 4DOS, 4NT, or Take Command to be a file, or vice
versa. If you see odd results from DIR (e.g. empty directories
that you know have files, or mangled filenames) you should
suspect that the file system on the other machine is not
identifying itself and its characteristics correctly to 4DOS,
4NT, or Take Command.
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>> Command Line Features You Forgot
All too often, we get "suggestions" to add a feature to 4DOS, 4NT, or
Take Command when the requested feature is already present. Usually,
it's been there for years! This is no surprise -- with such a large
feature set it's easy to find benefits in only a small subset of
what's offered, and at times forget what else might be there.
For this article we looked back through the list of command line
features, and thought we'd remind you of a few you may have forgotten.
(These descriptions use typical 4DOS and 4NT keystrokes; a few may be
different in Take Command):
* Command Completion: This is basic but we've seen many
experienced users ignore it. Need to recall a previous command?
Type the first part of it and press up-arrow, and you'll see only
the matching commands. This way there's almost never any need to
press up-arrow repeatedly to search for a command -- even if all
you remember is the first letter, you can speed up your search
considerably.
If you use command completion and see some useless commands in
the history that are messing up your scan for the one you want,
press Ctrl-D instead of the up-arrow. That will delete the
useless command and proceed to the next one, and next time it
won't be there.
* History Options: Do you wish the command you just recalled would
stay at the end of the history where you could find it again
quickly, and in sequence? Tired of going around in circles in
the history list? There are a whole range of configuration
options that let you control how the command history works. We
don't have room to cover all of them in detail here, but you can
read about them in the Configuration section of the online help.
See History and LocalHistory under Initialization Directives, or
on the Startup page of the configuration dialogs. Also see
HistCopy, HistMin, HistMove, and HistWrap under Configuration
Directives, or on the History page of the configuration dialogs.
* Automatic Directory Changes: Are you still using CD (or CDD) to
change directories? That's the old way -- in most cases it's
quicker to just type the directory name, followed by a backslash,
and let the command processor find the directory for you. For
even more flexibility, enable extended directory searches and you
can type just part of the name; see Directory Navigation in the
online help for details.
* Variable Name Completion: This works like filename completion.
If the argument begins with a %, the completion routines will
scan the environment for matching variable names. For example,
if the PROMPT and PATH variables are in the environment, in that
order, this sequence might be used to display the PATH:
[c:\] echo %p
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