[Freedos-devel] Incompatibility issue due to FreeCom Dir command's output layout and Dosbox kernel limitations

[Denis St-L. <ds...@ym...>]

Hi all,

There is an incompatibility issue with the "File Selection" dialogs of one of our legacy engineering MS-DOS programs. We don't have the source code of the program but I know it was written in Borland Turbo-Basic a long time ago. For years I thought it was a flaw in the FreeDOS compatibility. In fact I found recently this is because the output of the "dir" command is dumped in a temporary text file and parsed by the program in a fragile way. I discovered three requirements for this program to work. The display of the "dir" command must be formatted in a way that :

1 - The file dates must be printed with a 2 digits year representation
2 - The file times must be printed without the AM/PM flag (24 hours representation)
3 - The thousands delimiter of the file sizes must be a blank space (" ") instead of a comma (",")

The first requirement is easy to handle in autoexec.bat with: SET DIRCMD=/-4.  The second and third requirements need an appropriate fdconfig.sys setting, for example:  !Country = 002, 863, C:\FDOS\BIN\Country.sys

But when installing FreeDOS 1.2 in DosBox, we can't configure the fdconfig.sys. I want to use the program this way in order to operate it automatically with a Python script on the Host machine while sharing files and directories. So now I'm trying to patch and recompile the FreeCom's COMMAND.COM program to meet the above requirements.

I am not proficient in C but all seems to happen in the DisplaySingleDirEntry() function of the DIR.C file. At least I can remove the AM/PM flag with an ugly "p[strlen(p)-1] = 0;" just before the "fputs(p, stdout);" at line of code n°884.

The compilation works well but now I struggle to modify the thousand delimiter. I thought it could be easy with the convert() function of NUM_FMT.C (see temp[30 - c++] = nlsBuf->thousendsSep[0];) but it have no effects and I don't see how to change the country settings.

Does someone have an idea how this could be done?

By the way, I really like the FDIMPLES provided with the new FreeDOS 1.2 !

Regards,