wine/programs/wcmd

WCMD - A Command-Line Interface for WINE
Copyright (C) 1999 D Pickles (davep@nugate.demon.co.uk)
Open Source software published under the Wine Licence and Warranty.

This is an Alpha version and is very much "work in progress".

WHAT'S INCLUDED
- Sources
- A Makefile for compiling with LibWine. Build Wine with "-enable-dll" first.
- A Makefile for Borland C++ (needs editing for directories).

WHAT'S MISSING
- Command-line qualifiers for most builtin commands
- Wildcards and relative paths in COPY, MOVE and RENAME
- Set functionality in DATE, TIME, ATTRIB, LABEL
- Full internationalisation of the text (and commands?).

WHAT DOESN'T WORK
- The ATTRIB command reports all files having their Archive flag set, and the
READONLY setting depends on the Unix file permissions. All other flags are
always clear. The Wine attributes API calls map to the Unix stat() function
which cannot handle the other attributes available in DOS.
- Date/timestamps of files in the DIR listing are shown using the current
locale, which is set using the Unix LANG environment variable. By default the
US date-time format is used. Set eg "LANG=en_GB" for DD/MM/YY dates and 24-hour
times.
- Line editing and command recall doesn't work due to missing functionality in
Wine.
- DIR/S only works if no file specification is given, ie "DIR C:\TEMP /S" works
but "DIR C:\TEMP\*.C" doesn't work if a matching file exists in a lower
directory.
- Copy, rename, move, need the source and destination to be specified fully
with an absolute or relative path but no wildcards or partial filenames.
- Redirection is implemented as a command line is parsed. This means that ">"
and "<" symbols cannot appear in command arguments even within quotes.
- In many cases parsing and syntax checking is less rigorous than DOS. Thus an
existing DOS batch file will probably run unchanged under Wcmd but the reverse
may not be the case.

WINE OR WIN32 BINARY?
Wcmd can be built as a Wine binary, or (using a Win32 compiler) as a Win32 .EXE
image. The Wine binary is simpler to invoke from the U**x command line or from
a GUI such as KDE, however it is not possible to invoke a second shell using the
"WCMD /C filename" syntax. Conversely a Win32 application can be invoked from a
Win32 GUI such as Program Manager but that needs starting under Wine first.