DOG

For the latest information about DOG see the DOG Operating Guide

What is DOG?

DOG is a DOS shell, or command interpreter. DOG works on most, if not all flavors of DOS. I mainly target FreeDOS, but regularly test on MS-DOS 3.30 and 6.22 and DR-DOS 6.0 and 7.02.

DOG works similar to COMMAND.COM or 4DOS, but is different. First and probably most importantly DOG is not drop-in compatible with neither COMMAND.COM nor 4DOS. DOG does things differently. Second difference is that DOG commands are always just 2 letters, but still easy to remember. DOG also offers external commands allowing them to be more complex, and keeping the core of DOG smaller.

DOG has 2 classes of commands: INTERNAL and EXTERNAL. The internal commands are built-in to the DOG.COM binary and are always in memory and access the internals of DOG. There are 2 kinds of internal commands. Regular user commands and the batch file programming commands. The external commands are stand-alone executables, but considered to be part of DOG, and may access DOG internals where needed through an API.

• Syntax: DOG [-P|-E envsz|-A aliassz|-C command line]
• Parameters:
  • -P - Makes DOG a PERMANENT shell.
  • -E envsz - Makes the environment to envsz bytes (divisible by 16).
  • -A aliassz - Makes the alias space to aliassz bytes (divisible by 16).
  • -C command line - Executes the command line and exits.

A note about DOG version numbers

DOG uses the following version scheme:

0.8.5b
------
| | ||
| | |+-- Code maturity allways one of a (=alpha), b (=beta) OR f (=final)
| | +--- Patchlevel
| +----- Minor version
+------- Major version

This versioning scheme means that the maximum version of DOG will be 15.15.15f, in hex that will be FFFFh. So far DOG has only release alpha before version 0.8 and beta releases after 0.8.0b. The first final version will be 1.0.0f.