Faster than a speeding cursor...

More powerful than a command line...

Able to leap tall subdirectories in a single bound...

Look! Up on your monitor! It's a program! It's a utility! It's...

DOSMAN!

Strange visitor from another disk-drive, DOSMAN masquerades as a meek, mild-mannered utility program for a great metropolitan disk-magazine, but it has powers far beyond that of a mortal program as it fights for truth, justice, and the DOS way.

Getting onto a more serious note, DOS Manager (known as "DOSMAN" for short by its fans) is one of the more popular programs published over the 100-plus-issue run of our DOS-based subscription product, Softdisk PC. Though we're not even putting out a DOS-based product any longer, we still get frequent requests for an update of DOSMAN, and we've decided to fulfill them.

DOSMAN is an all-purpose disk utility. It runs under DOS, but it does things that are still difficult or impossible in the Windows interface. It lets you navigate your directory structure and see what's there, view files of a number of different formats, copy, delete, and move files, and many other functions. It's intelligent enough to figure out what file type each of your files is, regardless of its file extension (something Windows has difficulty with). It has a built-in text editor which lets you quickly edit files as you reach them in your directory listings, without the slowdown of having to keep loading another editor program, and without introducing weird word-processor commands that mess up the usability of the files as some other programs may do. It's even got features tailored to dealing with strange files people might throw at you from other systems. If the file is from a Mac or Unix system, with its line-break conventions different from the PC, Windows Notepad will choke on it, but DOSMAN works fine, and saves it out in standard PC format for the rest of your software to deal with. If your file has strange Macintosh characters in it that come out all wrong on your PC, DOSMAN can convert it.

Old-time DOS command line users have always found many uses for DOSMAN, including its powerful features that let you run a command on a whole set of files one at a time. But even those who have never left the Windows GUI may sometimes find they're in a situation that looks like a job for DOSMAN. Any time you can't get some file to load or launch in Windows, use DOSMAN to see what's really in it, whether it's messed-up in format, in a format of an application you don't have, or just saved mistakenly with the wrong file extension.

New DOSMAN users should press F1 twice from the main screen of the program to read the full instructions. Pressing F1 once from any part of the program will provide context-sensitive help.

Old-time DOSMAN users will be interested in what changes and improvements were made this time. The main change was that the program was recompiled with a patched compiler library to fix a bug in earlier versions that caused the program to crash when run on a newer, faster machine. It seems the authors of the compiler never expected PCs to get as fast and powerful as they now are, so the routines they used to initialize system timing overflowed when faced with the fastest current clock-speeds. That's now patched, so the new DOSMAN should work on any machine you try it on.

A new feature is the Ctrl-X command in the text editor, which converts all characters in the nonstandard Windows character-set range (#128-#149) to the closest standard ASCII character. Previously, the only character conversion commands were Ctrl-M to convert Mac characters to DOS text-mode, and Ctrl-W to convert Windows characters to DOS text-mode. The latter command converts all of the Windows characters from #128-#255 to their closest DOS text-mode equivalents, meaning that foreign accented letters are replaced with their DOS upper-ASCII versions which look correct in text mode programs like DOSMAN. This made sense a few years ago when the feature was first added, when most PC users still worked in text mode, but these days the character-set standard used by most is the ISO-Latin-1 set, which coincides with the Windows set in all but the positions #128-#149 (reserved for control characters in the standard, but used by Windows for such things as 'smart-quotes'). Thus, there is a need for a new command to change just the nonstandard parts of the Windows character set, leaving the rest alone. The resulting text will still look funny within DOSMAN if foreign characters are used, but will work correctly in other places such as Windows software and on the Web. Use Ctrl-X to perform this conversion on the file loaded in the DOSMAN text editor.

Coming Soon: I'm working right now on a new version of DOSMAN that supports long filenames when run from a Windows 95 and 98 system. (It will remain compatible with Windows 3.1 and "straight-DOS" systems too, by "degrading gracefully" to use the short filenames when the long-filename feature is not available.) This wasn't ready in time for this issue, but will be coming up really soon. Finally, the old DOS "8.3" file naming system will no longer be a limitation of DOSMAN, just as it's no longer a limitation of Windows. In the current version, all filenames and directory paths are shown in their "short-filename" form. You can still get to all your files and directories, but their names look funny, and any new files you create within DOSMAN will have short filenames, in all uppercase, because that's how DOS did it. The new version, coming soon, will show all your file and directory names in their full, long form. Keep watching for it!