HISTORY General remarks 9 september 1991 Change of name! There exists a very similar program, which on Bulletin Boards has the name 4WIN110.ZIP. It has a 4WIN.EXE executable and does more or less same as my PSHELL, but I think mine is better ;-). Aw, that guy does not even have a DESCRIBE-function! I used the name 4WIN for the compressed files, 'cause it was rather meaningful (4dos for WINdows). To avoid confusion I'll ship my program in the future as PSHELLxx.LZH, where xx is the version number. The makers of 4DOS, JP Software, also communicated with me over the name 4WIN. As I was not using it any more, it should not be a problem. It should be clear that I am not in any way affiliated with JP Software other than as a very satisfied 4DOS user. 4DOS is a trademarks of JP software (or is it the other way around? - that American folklore of quoting and claiming certainly keeps me confused). Their address is: P.O. box 1470 E.Arlington MA 02174 phone 617-646-3975 U.S.A. (I suppose) And no, I am not getting paid for advertising their products. It's just a very good system. --------------------- 8 october. Some people wrote me that they liked the program, but objected to the copyright notice, forbidding racist, fascist and zionist organizations to use my work. Well, I think that an author of any work has the right to decide on who is going to use his work and who not. Especially when he is giving it away (more or less) for free. And I enjoy discussions as much as the next man or woman, so keep them reactions coming, and/or append them to this HISTORY-file. ------------------- 15 october. To date I have collected twenty or so letters and Emails, zero bottles of beer and one ballpoint. Didn't push the button yet, it might explode ;-). Ingo, I liked your letter, thanks! Hans Paijmans. DEVELOPMENT HISTORY. PSHELL version 1.0 28 april 1991 COPY, REN, DEL and DIR may be used and changes will be reflected in the descriptions. Parameters not supported at the moment. TYPE and LIST are identical. They support wildcards. CHDIR, RMDIR, MKDIR work as expected (by me, that is). CDD changes both path and disk. DESCRIBE filenaam: will enable the user to add 4DOS descriptions to files in the directory. DOS and MS-WINDOWS commands may be typed on the commandline to start execution. This works for BAT-files and PIF-files too. EXIT. To kill the 4PSHELL just type EXIT on the command-line. ----------------------- PSHELL version 1.01 Bug removed, which prevented execution of external commends, if not in path. CD, RD and MD now also work as MKDIR, CHDIR etc. PUSHD dirname, DIRS and POPD added, with stack of twenty directory-names. MEMORY and FREE added (RAM and default disk). MOVE added (deletes files after copying them). HISTORY added. ----------------------- PSHELL version 1.02 -- 12 juni 1991 Scrollbar activated. Virtual PSHELL-window now is 256 lines and may be scrolled back and forth. CLS added (guess what). TREE added (displays directory-tree). ^E is now automatically followed by ^F when editing the command- history. /w - switch added to DIR (for wide display). Bug removed, which impeded DELETE and COPY after a number of times. Bug removed, which prevented loading programs if path was set. Bug removed, which sometimes did not update the descriptions after REN. PSHELL version 1.03 /a - switch added to DIR (displays attributes in stead of comments); /c - switch added to TYPE to add CR to lines, which don't have one. GLOBAL added for executing an internal command over several directories. STOP added, to quit WINDOWS without first having to discuss it with the progam manager. HELP added, which was a major pain in the ass. But thanks to God, Phillipe Kahn and my own gigantic intelligence, I finally figured how to write MS-WINDOWS help-files. DOS a command, which starts the COMMAND-interpreter that is in the COMSPEC-variable (either DOS or 4DOS). command line editor added. NB. this is fixed in version 1.04. Arrows now work like expected. -------------------------------------- PSHELL version 1.04 My thanks to Martin Fridael who tested the previous versions. Backslash and point may be placed behind commands without intervening space. N.B. spaces before the slash of a switch are obligatory! The caret (^) now may be used to combine several commands on the command line. DIR now displays the correct free space (in stead of the space of the defaultdisk). DOS-command removed in favour of 4DOS or COMMAND. Try them to see which one works on your system. STOP! quits Windows without confirmation ARROW-keys and Home/End now work too! Finally got my fingers between the keys. The close-box left-up now works without letting an accidental CTRL-C clobber the window. --------------------------------------- PSHELL version 1.05 DIR Displays sum of files in a directory. DEL Now you can stop a DEL *.* by pressing ctrl-c. I did find out the hard way that ctrl-c did not work here. EXCEPT (one of that 4DOS-goodies) works too! Just put filespecs inside parenthesis and give a disk-command. SET may be used to examine DOS environment variables (not to SET them!) PSHELL version 1.06 Although I considered version 1.05 as the final version, they kept pestering me for refinements like storing the window-dimensions in an INI-file. I consider it rot, but here goes... EXIT /S causes the current parameters to be saved in a PSHELL.INI. ---------------------------------- PSHELL version 1.07 Some germans asked for umlauts etc in the descriptions... They got it. But I did not find out how to enter them in PSHELL, so they will have to do this kind of descriptions in the 4DOS-shell, although they may read them in PSHELL. If they know how to make WINDOWS recognize that horrible german keyboards, they may tell me about it. /S added to TYPE and LIST. It suppresses weird characters and adds CR/LF's, so that you may TYPE executables and other non-ASCII-files. /W trims bit 8 (useful for some wordprocessor-files). Support added for the excellent WINBATCH batchprocessor for Windows from Morris Wilson. INDES. The command INDES has been added, which enables the selection of files which have a certain string in their description-part (not case- sensitive). DESCRIBE now accepts a stringargument, which lets you add descriptions to a lot of files in one command. like: DESCRIBE PSHELL*.* "That beautiful shell of Paijmans F1 may be used to start HELP now. And I finally got that bloody Icon nailed! It is not necessary anymore to give the drive explicitly when starting a BAT-file in the default-directory. Some minor bugs squashed, notably in Type, the file-comments and rename, thanks to Petri Hartoma, who also suggested the ICON-fix. Also a bug, wich prohibited executing external commands, which were preceded by a disk and colon. I will now stop development of this version (1.): it was only meant to give me the first 'feel' of Turbo pascal for Windows. Version (2) will be around later this year. I will use it to delve into the niceties of the OWL development kit, which comes with TPW, but looks, sounds and smells VERY complicated! PSHELL version 2 will have some new tricks, which I also miss in WINDOWS. (as you see version 1 developed into version 2 without the benefit of OWL. So much for good intentions!) Comments and suggestions are always welcome as are bottles with beer! See address below. (Must see the first dutchman yet who sends a bottle of beer for what he can have for free!). PSHELL version 1.09 23 August 1991 PSHELL version 2.01 BAC added, which works like COPY, but only copies new files and files, which are younger than the files on the destination drive UPDATE added, which copies only younger files over older files, but does not add new files. BEEP added. Look, you're not gonna believe this, but it beeps. LOAD added, which loads and minimizes a task as an Icon. INDES is split in INDES and INDESI. INDES now is case-sensitive and INDESI is not. WHERE filenaam. Searches default disk for file(s) BATCH-files. It had to come: PSHELL now has batchfiles of its own. Just use ASCII-files with the extension .PBT. BUG. A minor bug in the Batch-handling makes it necessary that the batch-file ends with two empty lines. ------------------------------------------- PSHELL 2.02 9 september 1991 An 'autoexec' added, which executes automatically whenever a new copy of pshell is started. KD added which means 'KillDir'. PROMPT added, which behaves more or less as the DOS prompt-command. VER added, which displays the version numbers of PSHELL, MS-DOS and MS-WINDOWS. Pseudo-device CON added, so 'COPY CON Filename' works too. Redirection-signs > and >> added. Move: if moving between directories on the same drive, a RENAME is done in stead of the rather slow COPY and DELETE. (Jarvi asked for that one too. Finnish beer will do nicely, thank you). I think that I now really will quit messing around with this shell. The next version will be downward compatible, but far more intelligent. -------------------------------------------------- PSHELL 2.03 14 october 1991 FIND added. -------------------------------------------------- PSHELL 2.04 20 october 1991 Directories now are sorted on mane by default. /E Sorts them like DOS does (i.e. in order of entry) /T Sort by date /S Sort by size PSHELL 2.05 7 december 1991 Mouse may be used to point at strings and thus to execute the files by double clicking them. Also for placing the cursor in the commandline. Read the help-file! Extension-support added to launch applications according to the extension of a datafile. That annoying flicker when writing lines longer than the window is in most cases gone now. PSHELL.INI now in C:\ (because of network problems). Menu's for ABOUT and HELP added. Some minor irregularities squashed, among which panic if redirection to a read-only file was attempted. DOS-addicts always want to do DIR/W in stead of the more logical DIR (space) /W. OK, they have their way: slashes may be used without intervening spaces now. But I don't have to say I like it! --------------------------------------------------- PSHELL 2.06 januari 1992 Unrecoverable Application error, which sometimes occurred when in combination with certain shareware, found and squashed. HELP [keyword] added (i.e. you may now add a keyword after typing HELP. INI added, which saves the INI file without exiting PSHELL NEW added which lists new or changed files after a certain date YESTERDAY to see or change the date for the NEW-command. A .PBT file may be used on the commandline when spawning another PSHELL. ------------------------------------------ PSHELL 2.07 januari 1992 PS, KILL, MAX, MIN and REST added, which operate on other processes. ------------------------------------------ PSHELL 2.08 Bug squashed, which prohibited TYPE of read-only files. Minor bug in command-line-editor corrected, so a command directly after an ESCape, now works again. More important: ALIAS and a number of System-variables added. TAB, F8 and F9 added for cycling through directory-list. An exclamation mark after a command involving a BAT-file will execute that file as a PBT-file. For that reason the command BAT was added too. Disk-full-handling added in the COPY-command. ------------------------------------------ PSHELL 2.09 March 1992 An irritating bug crept in the PROMPT-command. Squashed. I also retracted the inversion of clicked-on strings, which was more trouble than it was worth. Some people complained that spaces between >, >>, .. and the command were necessary. OK: now you can do DIR>TEST and DIR > TEST. Some other 'space-problems' also eliminated. Regular DOS is, I feel, a bit inconsequent in this respect, but people have got used to it... Other minor bugs and irritations have been removed, such as strange characters at the end of volume-names. BATCH-file handling is improved, notably in GOTO's that went backwards in the batch-file. The CD-command is now in line with DOS-usage. Colors and fonts may be changed by the COLORS and FONT-commands, but I am still working on it... A MAJOR CHANGE is, that I decided to use the WIN.INI file for extensions and other PSHELL-parameters. This made it possible to do away with the EXT-command, other than for displaying the current set of EXTensions. Pshell now uses the first twenty-five extensions under the [Extensions] part of WIN.INI. PSHELL 2.09d Ugly bug squashed that caused new INI-information to be written without erasing the old, so making that WIN.INI-file veeeery long. Also a bug on disk-full errors. Thanks to E. Trepanier who gave many good suggestions. ------------------------------------------ COPYRIGHT NOTICE Although everybody is invited to copy PSHELL for private use, the program is NOT public domain. I want to keep all options open to prohibit criminal, racist, zionist and fascist organizations to profit from my work. If you find you are using it on a regular basis, please register by sending $25 or 50 DM or something in that order, but it is not mandatory. Registering gives no other benefits than a warm feeling inside, but I might be quicker in helping out with problems. Giving this program away for free in a package deal, in which other products are sold, is considered commercial use and is explicitly prohibited without written permission from me. Just keep thinking "OK, so this dutch guy made something. How would I like to be treated if I was in his shoes?" If somebody wants to use my program commercially, just contact me. We will work out something. Suggestions and donations of bottles with Belgian beer are welcome at Hans Paijmans Elzenstraat 1 5183 VS Waalre Holland PAAI@KUB.NL (bitnet).