25) , . ...

DIR,    Using a comma IMMEDIATELY after DIR, shows ALL files, including
        the HIDDEN ones.

        EXAMPLE: DIR,

                              Willem van den Broek

        This appears only to work with version 5.  I tried it with 3.30,
        and it didn't display either IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS (both with S, H
        and R attribs) or a test file with A and H attribs.

        With version 5 it displayed the test file with H and A, but would
        not display IO.SYS or MSDOS.SYS with S, H and R.  This doesn't
        surprise me actually, since S alone (without H) will prevent
        inclusion of a file in a normal DIR.

        I didn't try version 4.

                              Mitch Ames

        Interesting: it does for me (display DOS5 IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS):
        However, 4DOS does not do it:

                              Dennis Mccunney

        It was pointed out in the 4DOS echo, and there were people
        who said it didn't work for them.   But, on my machine
        running straight dos6, it works! DIR, (dir comma) in my C:\
        shows all files including hidden and system.

                              Bill George

DIR..   With DOS 6.0 you can get a directory of -all- files (hidden,
        system, etc.) with this command.

        It was in a PC/Mag. or PC/Comp. issue not too long ago.

                              Andrew Barnhardt

        Have you noticed also how DIR... only displays directories, not
        files?

                              Gary Marden

        That's pretty slick. I tried DIR.. and got the parent 
        directory. DIR... got the current directory subdirs only.

                              Bill George

        Works for any level of directories. ".." will go to the previous
        directory as with pure DOS, "..." will go to the directory before
        the previous and so on.

                              Ng Cheng Kiang

        In DOS 5.0 it displays directories and files with no extensions.
        I tried "DIR ...", "DIR...", and "DIR ....".  They all behave
        the same way.

                              Gary Smith

        With DOS 5.0 and NDOS 6.0 DIR... gives me a list of
        subdirectories off of the root and a list of all files in
        the root directory, regardless of the file extension.
        It will yield this result regardless of what directory / 
        subdirectory I am in at the time the command is issued.

                              Gary Cooper
        
        COMMAND.COM generally seems to ignore excess characters.  Try
        copying something the AIRPLANES.PLAN, for example, and see what
        happens.

                              Gary Smith

        While I was playing around with "dir ..." and trying to see how
        it parses to showing all extensionless entities in the current
        directory, I noticed that DIR doesn't care if a specified directory
        structure exists or not, as long as the overall structure points
        back to something that does exist, i.e.

            "dir \thisdirdoesnotexist\.."

        will ignore the garbage and show the root directory.  If
        c:\bat exists, then

            "dir c:\bat\thisdirdoesnotexist\nordoesthisone\..\.."

        will show the c:\bat directory.

        Again, absolutely useless as far as i can tell <g>, but interesting.

        BTW, has anybody solved the "dir ..." mystery yet?  I also noticed
        "dir \..." works while "dir \bat\..." fails (any explicitly specified
        directory other than the root generates an "invalid directory" message).

                              Paul Leonard
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