Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!julian!uwovax!13001_6035
From: 13001_6035@uwovax.uwo.ca
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: Good date programs
Message-ID: <2219@uwovax.uwo.ca>
Date: 18 May 89 10:40:32 GMT
References: <1163@marlin.NOSC.MIL>
Lines: 58
Organisation: University of Western Ontario, Canada

In article <1163@marlin.NOSC.MIL>, jbjones@marlin.NOSC.MIL (John B. Jones) writes:
> I need a nice date program which I can use at the command line, which
> won't expect a return or prompt me for a change, and which displays the
> date and the day of the week.  The output will probably look like this:
> 
> 	May 16, 1989 	Tuesday
What follows is what I think is a more efficient way of displaying
the time and the date under DOS 3.3.  Somehow I think this is a more
elegant approach than piping DATE and TIME into FIND.

-----SHOWDT.BAT BEGINS-----CUT HERE-----
@echo off
set oldprompt=%prompt%
prompt Date: $d$_Time: $t.
echo on

@echo off
echo.
prompt %oldprompt%
set oldprompt=
-----SHOWDT.BAT ENDS-----CUT HERE-----
-----NOTE THAT THE 5TH LINE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.

For those new to DOS 3.3, I will explain how this works.
1. @echo off
            Standard ECHO OFF command, but when in a batch file a
            command is preceded by an '@' then it is not echoed.
            This avoids the ugly C:\>ECHO OFF at the beginning of the
            batch-file.
2. set oldprompt=%prompt%
            Save the old environment PROMPT variable, so we get the same
            DOS prompt when we are done.
3. prompt Date: $d$_Time: $t.
            This sets the DOS prompt (normally something like "C:\>")
            to show up "Date: <date>" followed by a return ($_), followed
            by "Time: <time>."
4. echo on
            Activate achoing so we can see the prompt.
5. ---<INTENTIONALLY A BLANK LINE>---
            Do nothing.  This is to allow us to see the prompt.
6. @echo off
            Turn off echo for the rest.
7. echo.
            Put an extra blank line in.  This makes the output neater.
8. prompt %oldprompt%
            Restore the original prompt.
9. set oldprompt=
            Release environment space taken up by the temporary OLDPROMPT
            variable.

This will only work under DOS 3.3 or higher as the '@' prefix is not allowed
under lower versions.  If you want to call this from other batchfiles, then
you can use the
        CALL SHOWTD.BAT
command from within a batchfile.

If you don't have DOS 3.3, you can use the piping approach someone else
thought up, but it does do a lot of wasteful disk access or buy DOS 3.3!