Announcing

The 32-bit Command Interpreter

version 1.0.0

by
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard

The 32-bit CMD for OS/2 is a native OS/2 command interpreter. It is designed to be highly compatible with the 16-bit CMD.EXE supplied with OS/2 by IBM, providing the same range of commands and the ability to execute the same command scripts, whilst on the other hand taking full advantage of 32-bit OS/2 and leaving behind several of the long-standing limitations and quirks IBM's command interpreter has inherited, sometimes for no reason, from MS/PC/DR-DOS (and even from CP/M in some cases).

Some useful accompaniments to the 32-bit CMD are utility suites such as the The OS/2 Command Line Utilities, and The Graham Utilities for OS/2.

The CMD API is supplied for the benefit of third party developers who wish to provide alternate user interfaces to the command interpreter, or who wish to write interactive command-prompt style tools without duplicating all of the effort of command-line parsing, variable expansion, built in commands, and command script execution.


FEATURES

The 32-bit CMD has all of the features that one expects as standard in an OS/2 command interpreter, including:

In addition, the 32-bit CMD provides several extensions to and improvements on the features of IBM's 16-bit CMD, such as:

THE CMD API

The 32-bit CMD provides an application programming interface for software developers to make use of. As the REXX interpreter can be linked into OS/2 applications to make them scriptable using the REXX language, so too can the script file interpreter of CMD be linked into OS/2 applications to make them scriptable using the CMD language.

Programs that use the API gain all of the features of the "regular" command interpreter, such as:

In addition, developers are provided with mechanisms to enable, disable, and rename the standard built-in commands, and to add their own built-in commands.

NON-ENGLISH VERSIONS

The messages displayed by the command interpreter and the external commands supplied with it are taken from message files rather than hard-coded into the programs themselves, which is of course the standard way that 32-bit OS/2 applications should work.

Some of the messages are taken from OS/2's own system files, and so those messages will automatically be rendered in the correct language on non-English versions of OS/2 without further effort.

Translating the remaining messages into another language is simply a matter of substituting new CMD.MSG and CMDH.MSG files at runtime. Volunteers for translating the messages are welcome to contact the author.


© Copyright 2000-2002 Jonathan de Boyne Pollard. All rights reserved. "Moral" rights asserted.
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