Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!calvin.spp.cornell.edu!richard
From: richard@calvin.spp.cornell.edu (Richard Brittain)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Need input for future DOS release
Message-ID: <1990Mar28.022610.2720@calvin.spp.cornell.edu>
Date: 28 Mar 90 02:26:10 GMT
References: <53686@microsoft.UUCP> <2017@clyde.concordia.ca> <1990Mar22.202023.25752@seri.gov> <2019@clyde.concordia.ca> <18888@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <1990Mar27.184657.12589@cec1.wustl.edu>
Reply-To: richard@calvin.spp.cornell.edu (Richard Brittain)
Organization: Cornell Space Plasma Physics Group
Lines: 31

In article <1990Mar27.184657.12589@cec1.wustl.edu> jcb2647@cec2.UUCP (James Christopher Beard) writes:
>I think the first step in upgrading DOS is to add the things that
>innumerable programmers have added one by one on their own as TSR's.
>4DOS, a replacement command processor from J.P. Software, incorporates
>most of these fixes in one place, including 
............
>I've probably left some out.  Note that 4DOS includes many Unix shell
>features, often in a more-usable form.  But one thing that DOS/4DOS
>batch files sadly lack is the ability to capture standard output of a
>command in an expression, as in csh lines using the `...` construct.
>This is enormously useful, and there's simply no DOS work-around that
>reproduces it.  (Almost as good would be an ability to redirect
>standard output to the value of an environment variable.)

The INPUT command reads stdin, and therefore can be used to do this. It
isn't all that `command` is, but can still be very useful.  If stdin
is more than 1 line, only the first line is written into the variable.

e.g., if 4DOS did not have %_CWD, you could always get it with
cd | input %%cwd

Point %tmp at a ram disk, and the above involves no disk activity.  I use
it to get the switch char and force it to a known state - or else you cannot
use setdos reliably.  (switch just writes the switchar to stdout).
switch | input %%switchar
setdos %switchar%W-

Richard Brittain,                   School of Elect. Eng.,  Upson Hall   
                                    Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
ARPA: richard@calvin.spp.cornell.edu	
UUCP: {uunet,uw-beaver,rochester,cmcl2}!cornell!calvin!richard