winscape 2229

You have got to be kidding. Go learn something about the internals of a couple other operating systems, then come back and talk about this.

What if I want to put a FAT filesystem on a satellite? How well does FAT handle all the contingencies? Are there well-defined filesystem check algorithms I can implement or do I just have to figure it out? What happens when my computer dies in the middle of write and I haven't bought Norton Utilities to recover the lost blocks- is DOS going to help me?

Theres lots of DOS conceptual stuff that comes with the FAT modules used by embedded systems- have a look at some of the filesystem structures- its crap. There is little rigor and you'll often just have to know the magic fields which you should care about and which you don't.

DOS is smart enough to maintain files in its filesystem. How come its not smart enough to defrag it and I have to buy a utility to do it?

The point is the DOS doesn't have a design as such. Its a pile of crap that evolved and was kept just on the ragged edge of failure without much improvement, occasionally with notable failures such MSDOS 4.

rest- but the command-line parameter delimiter all to often isn't a '-'.

There isn't much of anything to learn about dos- its little more than the int 21h api and the memory locations you can fool with and the "undocumented tricks" you have to know to get anything done. You seem to think DOS is somewhat special and different and is therefore excluded going to be anything more than glorified bootloaders.

Probably it is unix. But you'll notice the end-to-end lack of DOS.

Don't be an idiot. If you're trying to be funny, please try to actually be so.

Gregm