home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Night Owl 6
/
Night Owl's Shareware - PDSI-006 - Night Owl Corp (1990).iso
/
001a
/
rcmd20.zip
/
RCOMMAND.DOC
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1991-01-06
|
5KB
|
109 lines
RCOMMAND
Copyright, 1991, Steve Antonoff, Stone Mountain, GA
COMMAND line access to DOS with Carrier Detection
Version 2.0
January 6, 1991
Introduction
------------
RCOMMAND is a simple program that accepts commands from the
DOS "CONSOLE" and passes the commands to COMMAND.COM. While
RCOMMAND is watching for keystrokes, it is also monitoring carri-
er detect on a user specified COM port. RCOMMAND will terminate
if carrier is lost, making RCOMMAND a safer path to COMMAND.COM
for remote operations, thus the name: Remote COMMAND. RCOMMAND
will monitor any COM port: the I/O Port Address can be specified
on the command line for non-standard Port Addresses. A TEST mode
is available for local testing.
Command processing
------------------
Since all commands are passed to COMMAND.COM for processing,
all commands should execute normally with the following excep-
tions:
1) RAM tight situations (RCOMMAND occupies about 20KB
of RAM)
2) Attempts to modify the DOS environment strings with
the SET command (since RCOMMAND shells to DOS, a new DOS environ-
ment is created for each command, and any changes made to the
environment are lost.) To run a program that requires a change
to the environment, it is necessary to create a BATCH file that
does the modification and runs the program. Run the BATCH file
from RCOMMANd and all should be well.
Exiting RCOMMAND
----------------
There are 3 things which will cause RCOMMAND to exit:
1) Typing the command "EXIT" (exit with errorlevel 0)
2) Loss of carrier (exit with errorlevel 1)
3) A sequence of Control-C followed by a Q followed by
a Return (exit with errorlevel 2)
The third exit path, setting the errorlevel to 2, is to
enable DOORWAY to terminate RCOMMAND in the event of a timeout:
DOORWAY sends a plethora of codes to the keyboard buffer in an
attempt to terminate the application; RCOMMAND monitors for one
of the sequences that DOORWAY sends and terminates.
Specifying the PORT
-------------------
RCOMMAND will default to COM1, I/O port address 0x3F8,
although specifying a "1" on the command line will not hurt
anything. COM2 can be specified by adding the command line
parameter of 2 after RCOMMAND:
RCOMMAND 2
RCOMMAND knows the I/O address of COM2, as well: 0x2F8. For
any other COM port (or if your I/O address is non-standard), the
I/O Port Address can be specified on the command line, in hexa-
decimal, along with the COM port number:
RCOMMAND 3=3E8
will specify COM3 at an I/O Port Address of 0x3E8.
Test mode
RCOMMAND has a test mode. Specify TEST on the command line,
with or without other parameters, and carrier detect monitoring
is disabled, allowing local testing to be performed.
Special characters recognized by RCOMMAND
-----------------------------------------
Keystroke Action
------------ -------------------------------------------
ESCAPE Cancel current input line
LEFTarrow Move cursor to the left on current line
RIGHTarrow Move cursor to the right on the current line
INSert Insert a space whare the cursor is
DELete Delete the character under the cursor
Backspace Delete the character to the left of cursor
RETURN Process current line