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dos part 5
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2022-08-26
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-- Dos & Don'ts-Part 5 --
The next command we will discuss is
another 'Wedge Special'. It is called
the Display Directory command. The
Directory of a disk is a list of the
programs and other files on the disk.
Without the Wedge, it is virtually im-
possible to get a Directory Listing
without erasing the program currently
in the computer's memory. That is be-
cause the Directory is intended to be
LOADed into memory like a program, and
then LISTed. Of course, LOADing one
program erases any other that might be
in memory! But with the Wedge, you
can view the Directory without losing
your current program. Just type:
@$
and you will see something like:
0 'MY FIRST DISK ' M1 2A (reverse)
1 'DOS WEDGE' PRG
5 'DOS 5.1' PRG
18 'MENU' PRG
9 'MENU FILE' SEQ
The first line is in reverse colors.
It says that Drive #0 (The 1541 only
has 1 drive so you can ignore this)
has a disk in it that was formatted
(NEWed) with the name 'MY FIRST DISK'
and the ID 'M1'. The 1541 uses DOS V2
and 4040 format (format A), thus the
'2A' in the header.
The rest of the lines list the files
on the disk. For each file, the num-
ber of blocks (4 blocks = 1K) that the
file uses is displayed, followed by
the name of the file itself, followed
by the file type. You should only
see 4 types on any of your disks.
These types are PRG for PRoGram
(either BASIC or binary), USR for
USeR (another version of SEQ), SEQ
for SEQuential (usually a text or
data file), and REL for RELative (a
kind of data file).
Okay. Let's suppose that you wrote
the program called 'MENU' on the disk.
Now let's suppose you make some modi-
fications to the program, and now you
want to save the changed version. You
type SAVE 'MENU',8 ,but to your hor-
ror, the red light starts flashing af-
ter less than a second! The drive
didn't make any clattering noise or
anything, but the drive says "ERROR"
with that red LED! Just request the
Disk Status (with '@' or '>'), and you
see '63, FILE EXISTS,18,01'. The nice
folks at Commodore didn't want you to
accidently save over an existing file,
so they don't let you do it. There is
a "Save with Replace" command, but as
I warned you in the first issue, DON'T
USE IT!! (Serious Bug There!) In-
stead, you have two choices.
The easiest but less safe way is to
remove the old copy, then save the new
version. Thus, we introduce a new
maintenance command, 'SCRATCH'.
---------Continued in Part 6----------