Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!rex!doerschu
From: doerschu@rex.cs.tulane.edu (Dave Doerschuk)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Re: How does del *.* work?
Message-ID: <5662@rex.cs.tulane.edu>
Date: 14 Jan 91 05:57:44 GMT
References: <1991Jan8.123410.1564@en.ecn.purdue.edu> <58340001@hpopd.pwd.hp.com>
Organization: Computer Science Dept., Tulane Univ., New Orleans, LA
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In article <58340001@hpopd.pwd.hp.com> dcc@hpopd.pwd.hp.com (Daniel Creswell) writes:
>I'd be willing to bet that while you use nice friendly calls del either uses
>some undocumented dirty one's or more likely goes straight to the FAT by-
>passing all those slow calls your making. I may be wrong but I'd have a guess
>at that!

An item that I haven't seen yet in this thread is that del is "resident",
so to speak, in command.com.  I think.  Meaning that the loader doesn't
need to go out to disk and find a file named "del.com", since it doesn't
exist!  I'd assume that the code for del is located in the transient part
of command.com, but I'm no expert.  This is certainly part of the reason
why del operates so quickly, no need to read/load the executable file.

Thanks for reading,
Dave
doerschu@rex.cs.tulane.edu