The Amigados Manual Bantam Computer Books Ask Your Bookseller for the Books You Have Missed
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
The AmigaDOS Manual Bantam Computer Books Ask your bookseller for the books you have missed THE AMIGADOS USER'S MANUAL by Commodore-Amiga, Inc. THE APPLE //c BOOK by Bill O'Brien THE COMMODORE 64 SURVIVAL MANUAL by Winn L. Rosch COMMODORE 128 PROGRAMMER'S REFERENCE GUIDE by Commodore Business Machines, Inc. EXPLORING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ON YOUR APPLE II by Tim Hartnell EXPLORING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ON YOUR COMMODORE 64 by Tim Hartnell EXPLORING THE UNIX ENVIRONMENT by The Waite Group / Irene Pasternack FRAMEWORK FROM THE GROUND UP by The Waite Group / Cynthia Spoor and Robert Warren HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF COMPUSERVE, 2d ed. by Charles Bowen and David Peyton HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF THE SOURCE by Charles Bowen and David Peyton THE MACINTOSH by Bill O'Brien THE NEW jr. A GUIDE TO IBM'S PC;> by Winn L. Rosch ORCHESTRATING SYMPHONY by The Waite Group / Dan Shafer PC-DOS / MS-DOS User's Guide to the Most Popular Operating System for Personal Computers by Alan M. Boyd POWER PAINTING: COMPUTER GRAPHICS ON THE MACINTOSH by Verne Bauman and Ronald Kidd / illustrated by Gasper Vaccaro SMARTER TELECOMMUNICATIONS Hands-On Guide to On-Line Computer Services by Charles Bowen and Stewart Schneider SWING WITH JAZZ: Lotus jazz on the Macintosh by Data tech Publications Corp. / Michael McCarty USER'S GUIDE TO THE AT&T PC 6300 PERSONAL COMPUTER by David B. Peatroy, Ricardo A. Anzaldua, H. A. Wohlwend, and Data tech Publications Corp. The AmigaDOS Manual Commodore-Amiga, Inc. BANTAM BOOKS TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON • SYDNEY • AUCKLAND AMIGADOS MANUAL A Bantam Book I February 1986 Cover design by }. Caroff Associates All rights reserved. Copyright © 1986 by Commodore Capital, Inc. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: Bantam Books, Inc. ISBN 0-553-34294-0 Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, Nezv York, New York 10103. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA H 0987654321 Contents The AmigaDOS User's Manual The AmigaDOS Developer's Manual The AmigaDOS Technical Reference Manual Preface This book, The AmigaDOS Manual, is a combination of three separate publications: The AmigaDOS User's Manual The AmigaDOS Developer's Manual The AmigaDOS Technical Reference Manual The User's Manual contains information of interest to every Amiga user. There are many more commands that AmigaDOS understands than are acces• sible from the Workbench. If a user uses Preferences to turn on the CLI, these new commands become accessible. The Developer's Manual describes how to use AmigaDOS from within a program rather than from a command line interface. It also fully documents the Amiga Macro Assembler and Linker. (Note that the Amiga Macro Assem• bler is available as a separate product.) The Technical Reference Manual describes the data structures that AmigaDOS uses internally. It includes descriptions of how DOS disk data is stored, and the format of the "object-files" that AmigaDOS uses. A developer or expert user would find the information in this technical section to be very useful. Together these three publications, in this single volume, comprise the essen• tial guide to AmigaDOS. AmigaDOS Manual Introduction 1. Introducing AmigaDOS 2. AmigaDOS Commands 3. ED—The Screen Editor 4. EDIT—The Line Editor Appendix: Error Codes and Messages Glossary Introduction This manual describes the AmigaDOS and its commands. The Command Line Interpreter (CLI) reads AmigaDOS commands typed into a CLI window and translates them into actions performed by the computer. In this sense, the CLI is similar to more "traditional" computer interfaces: you type in commands and the interface displays text in return. Because the Workbench interface is sufficient and friendly for most users the Workbench diskettes are shipped with the CLI interface "disabled". To use the commands in this manual you must "enable" the CLI interface. This puts a new icon, labeled "CLI" on your Workbench. When you have selected and opened this icon, a CLI window becomes available, and you can use it to issue text commands directly to AmigaDOS. How to Enable the Command Line Interface Boot your computer using the Kickstart and Workbench diskettes. Open the diskette icon. Open the "Preferences" tool. Near the left-hand side of the screen, about two-thirds of the way down you will notice "CLI" with a button for "ON" and a button for "OFF". Select the "ON" button. Select "Save" (lower right part of the Preferences screen) to leave Preferences. How to Open a CLI Window To use the CLI commands, you open a CLI window. Open the "System" drawer. The CLI icon (a cube containing "1>") should now be visible. Open it. Using the CLI To use the CLI interface select the CLI window and type the desired CLI commands. The CLI window(s) may be sized and moved just like most others. To close the CLI window, type "ENDCLI". INTRODUCTION 3 Workbench and CLI, Their Relationship and Differences Type "DIR" to display a list of files (and directories) in the current disk directory. This is a list of files that makes up your Workbench. You may notice that there are more files in this directory than there are icons on the Work• bench. Workbench only displays file "X" if that file has an associated "X.info" file. Workbench uses the ".info" file to manipulate the icon. For example, the diskcopy program has two files. The file "Diskcopy" con• tains the program and "Diskcopy.info" contains the Workbench information about it. In the case of painting data files like "mount.pic" the file "mount.pic.- info" contains icon information and the name of the program (default) that should process it (GraphiCraft). In this case, when the user "opens" the data file (mount.pic) Workbench runs the program and passes the data file name (mount.pic) to it. AmigaDOS subdirectories correspond to Workbench drawers. Random ac• cess block devices such as disks (DFO:) correspond to the diskette icons you have seen. Not all programs or commands can be run under both Workbench and the CLI environment. None of the CLI commands described in Chapter 2 of this manual can be run from Workbench. For example, there are two separate Diskcopy commands. The one in the :cl directory is run from AmigaDOS (CLI). The one in the system directory (drawer) is run from Workbench. Chapter 1 Introducing AmigaDOS This chapter provides a general overview of the AmigaDOS operating system, including descriptions of terminal handling, the directory structure, and com• mand use. At the end of the chapter, you'll find a simple example session with AmigaDOS 1.1 Chapter Overview / 1.2 Terminal Handling 1.3 Using the Filing System 1.3.1 Naming Files 1.3.2 Using Directories 1.3.3 Setting the Current Directory 1.3.4 Setting the Current Device 1.3.5 Attaching a Filenote 1.3.6 Understanding Device Names 1.3.7 Using Directory Conventions and Logical Devices 1.4 Using AmigaDOS Commands 1.4.1 Running Commands in the Background 1.4.2 Executing Command Files 1.4.3 Directing Command Input and Output 1.4.4 Interrupting AmigaDOS 1.4.5 Understanding Command Formats 1.5 Restart Validation Process 1.6 Commonly Used Commands: An Example Session 1.7 Conventions Used 1.1 Chapter Overview AmigaDOS is a multi-processing operating system designed for the Amiga. Although you can use it as a multi-user system, you normally run AmigaDOS for a single user. The multi-processing facility lets many jobs take place simul- INTRODUCING AMIGADOS 5 taneously. You can also use the multi-processing facility to suspend one job while you run another. Each AmigaDOS process represents a particular process of the operating system—for example, the filing system. Only one process is running at a time, while other processes are either waiting for something to happen or have been interrupted and are waiting to be resumed. Each process has a priority associ• ated with it, and the process with the highest priority that is free to run does so. Processes of lower priority run only when those of higher priority are waiting for some reason—for example, waiting for information to arrive from the disk. The standard AmigaDOS system uses a number of processes that are not available to you, for example, the process that handles the serial line. These processes are known as private processes. Other private processes handle the terminal and the filing system on a disk drive. If the hardware configuration contains more than one disk drive, there is a process for each drive. AmigaDOS provides a process that you can use, called a Command Line Interface or CLI. There may be several CLI processes running simultaneously, numbered from 1 onward. The CLI processes read commands and then execute them. All commands and user programs will run under any CLI. To make additional CLI processes, you use the NEWCLI or RUN commands. To remove a CLI process use the ENDCLI command. (You can find a full descrip• tion of these commands in Chapter 2 of this manual.) 1.2 Terminal Handling You can direct information that you enter at the terminal to a Command Line Interface (CLI) that tells AmigaDOS to load a program, or you can direct the information to a program running under that CLI. In either case, a terminal (or console) handler processes input and output.