Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!super.upenn.edu!dsl.cis.upenn.edu!catone
From: catone@dsl.cis.upenn.edu (Tony Catone)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: fc and wildcards
Keywords: won't work
Message-ID: <3329@super.upenn.edu>
Date: 8 Feb 88 22:04:07 GMT
References: <3762@xanth.cs.odu.edu>
Sender: news@super.upenn.edu
Reply-To: catone@dsl.cis.upenn.edu.UUCP (Tony Catone)
Distribution: na
Organization: University of Pennsylvania
Lines: 26

In article <3762@xanth.cs.odu.edu> kahn@xanth.cs.odu.edu (Gary I Kahn) writes:
>The MS/DOS 3.2 manual has examples of using the FC (file comparison)
>command with ambiguous file names.  When I try to use wildcards (just like
>in the examples), the program gives me an "Unable to open text1.*", or
>something like that, and it aborts.  Anyone have any comments?  I want to
>compare all of the files in one directory with files of like names in
>a parallel (backup) directory.  Thanks in advance.

You could always use the FOR and IF DOS commands, either in a batch file or
interactively (the later method was never explained very well in the PC-DOS
manuals I read, way back when).  These commands have existed in MS- and PC-
DOS since version 2.0, and are very useful for just the sort of thing you
want to do.  An example: compare all files in \original with like names in
\backup.  Swich into the \original directory and issue the command

  for %a in (*.*) do if exist \backup\%a fc %a \backup\%a

from the DOS command line prompt.  Of course, this runs much slower than
file name expansion would from inside fc, since this method loads fc each
time a match is found.  RAM disks speed everything up.  It's not as nice
as being able to use ambiguous file names, but it does work across a
variety of DOS versions and hardware.

					- Tony
					  catone@dsl.cis.upenn.edu
					  catone@wharton.upenn.edu