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dos part 7
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2022-08-26
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DOS 'n' Don'ts Part 7
---------------------
Last month, we covered the Scratch,
Copy, and Rename commands (among oth-
ers). We showed how to use these com-
mands with one file at a time. This
month, we will not introduce any new
commands, but will show how to specify
more than one file at a time with the
old commands.
The secret to this is to use 'wild
card' characters. A wild card in po-
ker or other card games is a card that
can stand for any other card. The wild
card characters work the same way.
The wild card characters are the
question mark ('?') and the asterisk
('*'). The '?' can stand for any one
character, and the '*' can stand for
the remainder of a file name. For
example: Suppose we have a disk in
our drive that has 6 files, such that
a directory listing (using DOS WEDGE)
produces:
0 "MY OWN DISK " MD 2A
45 "FILE MAKER" PRG
9 "FIRE 1" PRG
3 "FILE 1" SEQ
6 "FILE 2" SEQ
5 "FILE 3" SEQ
12 "FILLER" PRG
3 "JUNQUE" PRG
601 BLOCKS FREE.
With the above directory, the fol-
lowing filenames produce the following
matches:
FILENAME MATCES
-------- ------
'*' all files
'F*' everything except
'JUNQUE'
'FILE *' 'FILE MAKER'
'FILE 1'
'FILE 2'
'FILE 3'
'FILE ?' 'FILE 1'
'FILE 2'
'FILE 3'
'FIL???' 'FILE 1'
'FILE 2'
'FILE 3'
'FILLER'
'FI?E*' 'FILE MAKER'
'FIRE 1'
'FILE 1'
'FILE 2'
'FILE 3'
'??????' everything except
'FILE MAKER'
Note that an asterisk is the same
as enough question marks to finish out
a 16-character file name. Contrary to
the manual, you cannot put an asterisk
anywhere except as the last character.
For example, you could NOT use the
filename 'FIL*ER' to match both 'FILE
MAKER' and 'FILLER'.
--------- continued in PART 8 --------