FreeCom - The DOS Command Line Interface

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Source code distribution of FreeCOM - a Command line interface program, which substitutes COMMAND.COM

About

This software is part of the FreeDOS project. Please visit the freedos web page at http://www.freedos.org/ for more information about FreeDOS.

FreeCOM implements the command processor for the DOS kernel. It is usually the first program started by the kernel and provides a command line interface to interactively run other DOS programs.

Additionally, FreeCOM implements a BATCH file processor allowing scripting of commands as well. See http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/batch/index.htm for more help with batch commands.

More information

Changes since last official release

How to compile FreeCOM

Bugs and Help

The COMMAND.COM web site (including source hosting) is at

https://github.com/FDOS/freecom

Bugs may be filed at https://github.com/FDOS/freecom/issues or you may send any bug reports, comments or other info to the one of the FreeDOS mailing lists. For subscription and archives, see:

http://www.freedos.org/forums/

This software has been developed by many people. Older changes are listed along with who provided the change within docs/HISTORY.TXT file and more recent changes can be seen with git log (HISTORY.TXT is only updated periodically).

Please note that this software is separate from the DOS-C kernel and is intended to be compatible with a variety of kernels that implement the DOS API (i.e. it should run on FreeDOS DOS-C kernel and on other DOS kernels such as Microsoft's DOS).

Installation

To use this shell, just run the COMMAND.COM file. You can also add this to your CONFIG.SYS file:

SHELL=<shell path><shell filename>

e.g.

SHELL=C:\FREEDOS\COMMAND.COM /P

See http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/command.htm for description of command line options.

Current Features

• environment handling with prompt and path support
• directory utilities
• command-line history with doskey-like features + filename completion (TAB)
• batch file processing
• input/output redirection and piping
• loadhigh support
• alias support
• flow control (IF, FOR, GOTO, labels)
• support for error and other messages in multiple languages