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MS-DOS 3.30 / 3.31: tools are welcome!

Ruud

Veteran Member
Joined
Nov 30, 2009
Messages
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Heerlen, NL
In the very early days I used 3.30 for quite a long time but then handling big disks became a problem. And no, I never hear of 3.31 until some months ago. But tinkering a lot with 8088 systems I prefer 3.3x above 6.22 because of having more free memory available. (yes, I know about USE!UMBS). Having found 3.31 I want to use it more but I ran into some luxury problems. The main one is that I cannot sort the directory on forehand like with using DIRCMD under 6.22.

So my main question: is there a tool/trick or what ever to sort the directory under 3.3x?

Any pointers to other tools or tricks are welcome as well. Many thanks in advance!
 
I prefer using MS-DOS 5.0 on older systems, as it is IMO the best trade-off between size and comfort. I don't see much point going way older just for some kb of memory. Old programs don't need 600 kb of free memory and those that do will most often not run on a DOS version as old as 3.x or on a 8088/86 anyway.

There might be special cases, of course, but for those, you can always boot from floppy disk.
 
You can also use an alternative command interpreter like 4DOS. In 4DOS you can define an alias to set the default parameters for the DIR command
 
DOS 5 supports DIRCMD. And the /o sort order options. I've always referred 5 - one reason is that I actually have the full printed manual for it.

Geoff
 
I have a full dead tree manuals for quite a number Dos variant. A pirated copy of Compaq MS Dos 3.31 was installed on my very first computer, a generic 286/16 clone, until I bought DR Dos 6 and GeoWorks Ensemble 1.2 Pro.
 
I use DS (Directory Sort) from Norton Utilities 6.01. Also SPEEDISK, which is the equivalent of DEFRAG in DOS 6.x/7.x (which itself requires DOS 5.0 or higher to run) can sort directories while defragging.

Also, MOVE and DELTREE, copied from IBM's PC DOS 7.0/2000, work fine in DOS 3.3x, as does UNDELETE from MS-DOS 6.22. If you have a NEC V20, 286, or higher CPU, you can even use EDIT from Windows 9x. If you have a plain 8088 or 8086, use EDIT/QBASIC from MS-DOS 6.22.
 
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