command.com pre 6 and copy command

[fritzmueller]

No description provided.

[fritzmueller]

command com does not show the target path when copying a file. Example:
c:\ md test
cd test
a:
copy a:*.*
shown result:
file.ext --> c: file.ext
instead of
file.ext --> c:\test\file.ext
This is confusing as you are not sure if it copies to C:\ or to C:\test

[fritzmueller]

additional ( I tried to report them via Eric Auer first, but I am not sure if they ever arrived):

a) it would be fine if command.com would offer the option "halt" or "shutdown" (well, not standard in DOS, I know), at the moment I use fdisk -reboot to reboot. This would be very helpful in virtual machines!

b) when "path" is set to "A:" in autoexec.bat (I copied autoexec from A: and removed it then) on harddrive C: you always get a message
"drive not ready" and have to confirm several times that you want to abort. I know that this is standard behaviour in DOS,
but it is nerving and causes strange things, if I remember right I had problems with "move" in one case because it was
not found when I was in a subfolder. Same problem when I set "path A:; C:, C:\DOS;), I know, A:\ should be put to the end (or not set at all).
But I think it would be helpful if "A:" could be ignored after the first trial, at least in config.sys and autoexec.bat

c) copying bigger files worked fine, even with files of a size of 4,294,963,200 Bytes. The only (correct) thing I noticed was
"copy /B 1.txt+2.txt result.txt". In case that I add two 4 GB files to a 8 GB file it stopped at the 4 GB FAT 32 border without any message that
the second file could not be written completely. But who creates files bigger than 4 GB in DOS? Maybe in a database.

[bartoldeman]

@fritzmueller I will leave this in as a feature request mostly since I am concentrating on bug fixes. MS COMMAND only displays the filenames so FD COMMAND is already more verbose.

As for b), have you tried using /F as in shell=c:\command.com /e:1024 /p/f this should directly fail,
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abort,_Retry,_Fail%3F

[fritzmueller]

Hi, I just found a strange problem in the latest command Beta version.
My test ran in VirtualBox 6.0.14, I booted there from a real diskette.
I created a file hello.txt and hello1.txt at c:\ .
When executing the command: copy command.com C:\hello.txt or C:\hello1.txt I get a question if I really want to overwrite the existing file and have to confirm. So far ok.
When executing the command from A: the result is different.
A:\ copy command.com (or something else) c:\hello.txt the question "Overwrite C:\hello.txt YES/NO/ALL/QUIT?" appears but the machine does not stop at this point and wait for the answer. It simply continues and executes the job. Maybe it is a problem of virtualbox, but I hope it is simple to reproduce. The effect happened with all 3 command.com versions.

Addition: the diskette seems to be write protected when I run this in Virtual Box!