I asked this question (quite!) some time ago... Is this .really. how the dir command is supposed to work?

Code:

At least it doesn't crash but it's not interactive and it makes a mess of displaying the current directory if there's a lot of files in it.

See what I had to do? I had to rely on my own resources and brain-power... Well, that may be going a bit too far - all I had to do was read a 19yo AmigaDOS manual that I excavated from under my bed.

Quote:

Doing another interactive DIR from within an initial interactive DIR sounded like my kind of fun - just had to use my trusty old WB3.1 version of dir to see what was meant by 'garbled output'. It's exactly the same as the output from the non-nested MorphOS (& AROS?) interactive DIR.

I also tested this in WinUAE to see what would happen - it's the same.

What does opt i do anyhow?

I did do a quick search, but that found nothing, and I'm too lazy to keep digging..

According to my old reference book, opt a, d, f and i are only still recognised for compatibility with (much!) older versions of workbench - like 1.x From 2.0 onward the command format is stated more like this:

DIR [<dir|pattern>] [ALL] [DIRS] [FILES] [INTER]

INTER replaces OPT I and it's an interactive directory listing mode that pauses at each directory listing name and waits for user input. Specifically:

Return - shows the next name in the list
E - enters a directory
B - goes back one directory level
DEL or DELETE - deletes a file or empty directory
T - types the contents of a file
C - enter additional AmigaDos commands
Q - quit interactive
? - shows a list of the interactive mode commands

The only ones I ever used were E & T - I've just found out about the others. The one that lets you enter additional commands has one caveat - entering another DIR INTER command (or nesting two DIR INTER commands) doesn't work the way you might expect. As mentioned above, if this is done on a system with a working dir command the output is just like the non-nested MorphOS DIR INTER command.

Sooo... Doesn't anyone else use the shell these days? I tried to submit a bug report through the Ambient -> About MorphOS -> Support bug reporting feature but I don't know if it was acknowledged.

That's normal. You most likely will not receive any feedback on such a bugreport, instead you have to wait for the next release and see if it's been taken care of. It's quite tedious, yes.

it's a good time for founding a bounty (or asking relevant people) to write documentation for all system commands and tools. i could translate some os3.1 command documentations, but how about new functions?

bye, MarK.

I checked and the interactive mode implementation appears to be incomplete. Since this isn't exactly the most critical component it remains to be seen if/when this will be fixed.