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4DOS and Norton Commander

Zare

Zare

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NC 5.5, 4DOS 8.0 on PC-DOS 7.0, seems like complete shell interaction in NC is broken. Anything you execute just drops out to prompt immediately without effect. Including changing drive.
Tried to google but didn't get anything. Does NC expect command.com and won't work with 4DOS?
 
Zare said:
NC 5.5, 4DOS 8.0 on PC-DOS 7.0, seems like complete shell interaction in NC is broken. Anything you execute just drops out to prompt immediately without effect. Including changing drive.
Tried to google but didn't get anything. Does NC expect command.com and won't work with 4DOS?
Click to expand...
I like to use QDOS or QuickDOS. There are 2 distinct versions; i.e. QDOS II & QDOS 3. The former being for 8-bit and the latter being for 16-bit. One can run the 8-bit version on a 16-bit system but you lose some functionality like color, for example. Not trying correlate QDOS with your issues only to point out that you may have encountered a rare 8/16-bit issue. As far as 4DOS goes, I've never really got into it and what I added may only confuse your issue further. But, a command line interpreter does what it does and I don't know that 4DOS was 'in vogue' back in the early DOS days. What happens when you substitute COMMAND.COM for 4DOS? Basically maybe a compatibility issue.
 
Yes, the system shell is 4DOS not COMMAND.COM. In this case NC misbehaves.
I guess NC is just not compatible if one switches the command line interpreter. I'll just try some other file managers see how they do.
 
I've hardly ever used NC so haven't got experience with the combination you're using, but in case nobody has any better advice:

Norton Utilities 8 for DOS (includes their "NDOS" which is based on 4DOS. I'm not sure when they first introduced this. Perhaps it might be more compatible? I can't find any mention of "commander" in NDOS.DOC and I'd like to think they'd have mentioned if two of their products weren't compatible, but then again maybe not.

If NC can't be made to work with 4DOS or similar, I wonder if you could make an NC.BAT which does:

Code: 
set COMSPEC=c:\command.com
c:\nc\nc

or:

Code: 
c:\command /c c:\nc\nc

so that NC uses COMMAND.COM even though you might start it from 4DOS?
 
Thanks, I forgot I could just use COMMAND.COM as one-off interpreter.
Wiki for NDOS says it's based on 4DOS 4.3, which doesn't have LFN - main reason why I use it.

I might try version 5 which is DOS-contemporary. But I feel these newer versions that came out in 21st century did not break anything significant - it's just minor updates.

In any case I'll do the batch scripts and also look into other file managers. Something I haven't done since back then when I settled on the 'orthodox way'. I used XTree Gold and MSDOS shell brifely. Could be a good opportunity to try others :)
 
4DOS is extremely compatible with just about all DOS software. Off the top of my head, I'd say the problem between Norton Commander and 4DOS is that the command-line editing feature of NC requires 4DOS's command-line editing feature to be set to line mode instead of character mode. In other words, the two editing modes are conflicting with each other.

There is a setting in 4DOS.INI that can fix the problem. You can also turn it on/off on the fly with the 4DOS command SETDOS, if memory serves.
 
I'm guessing here, but NC probably uses INT 2Eh to pass the command to the shell. Depending on the version of 4DOS, there's a config option that has to be enabled to be compatible with that ("FullINT2E=yes" in 4DOS.INI)
 
dreNorteR said:
I'm guessing here, but NC probably uses INT 2Eh to pass the command to the shell. Depending on the version of 4DOS, there's a config option that has to be enabled to be compatible with that ("FullINT2E=yes" in 4DOS.INI)
Click to expand...

Good point. I hadn't thought of that possibility. I'm sure there were tech notes about how NC and NDOS work together back when they were both current products. I think that would be a good thing to explore.
 
acgs said:
4DOS is extremely compatible with just about all DOS software. Off the top of my head, I'd say the problem between Norton Commander and 4DOS is that the command-line editing feature of NC requires 4DOS's command-line editing feature to be set to line mode instead of character mode. In other words, the two editing modes are conflicting with each other.

There is a setting in 4DOS.INI that can fix the problem. You can also turn it on/off on the fly with the 4DOS command SETDOS, if memory serves.
Click to expand...

The enter is registered so I don't think input mode is the culprit. But I'll try your recommendation.

dreNorteR said:
I'm guessing here, but NC probably uses INT 2Eh to pass the command to the shell. Depending on the version of 4DOS, there's a config option that has to be enabled to be compatible with that ("FullINT2E=yes" in 4DOS.INI)
Click to expand...

Good catch. NC subshell prompt is in uppercase - C:\FOO, which may look OK but it's really C:\foo as shown with 4DOS+LFN. A bit of Disk/CPU activity happens after running the command in subshell, always the same amount of time, and always dropping back. It may be a consequence of subshell failing to call the interpreter correctly.

acgs said:
Good point. I hadn't thought of that possibility. I'm sure there were tech notes about how NC and NDOS work together back when they were both current products. I think that would be a good thing to explore.
Click to expand...

I did start that way, but it's hard to google, too much hits that don't deal with NC or DOS. If I narrow it like "-midnight -total -windows norton commander nc 4dos", there are no relevant results. Those sporadic valid hits that deal with 4DOS and NC are about NDOS.
 
DOS isn't UNIX/Linux - there's no subshell, and the prompt is always displayed by NC itself (so it would always be upper case). When you press enter on the command line, it calls interrupt 2Eh to pass it to the primary command interpreter. Ralf Brown's Interrupt List mentions that this has "unpredictable" results when running from inside a batch file: http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/rbinter/id/64/42.html

Are you using a batch file to start NC?
 
No I'm not using a bat and I know there are no Unix concepts here but for the sake of simplicity I'm using the word subshell for NC's command prompt. So it's probably about FullNT2E switch in ini.
I'll try this out in a couple of days when I get time to work over this PC.
 
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