A-Shell typically recognizes two types of filespecs: it’s own DevPPN filespecs and those native to the host operating system.
DevPPN filespecs have the form:
{device:}filename{.ext}{[p,pn]}
DevPPN filenames consist of 1-72 RAD50 characters; allowable characters are A-Z, 0-9, dollar sign ( $ ), hyphen ( - ) and underscore ( _ ). Spaces are not allowed. DevPPN filenames are not case sensitive, but in the Unix environment are mapped to lower case native filespecs.
Extensions can be from 0 to 8 RAD50 characters. Multiple extensions are not allowed.
Optionally, the order of the parts can be changed to put the [p,pn] in front of the filename, e.g. DSK3:[100,200]ABC.DAT
Within ASB programs, file I/O statements recognize and accept both DevPPN and native filespecs.
At the command prompt, filespecs used in System Commands are expected to be in DevPPN format. But many commands, including all of the wildcard commands, will allow you to specify a native filespec by enclosing it in quotes. For example:
.COPY HOSTS.TXT="/etc/hosts" /NOD
.TYPE "/etc/hosts"
.SIZE "c:\vm\miame\bin\ashw32.exe"
.DIR HASH.DIR="/vm/miame/bin/ashell" /H
When using quoted native filespecs, you cannot use wildcards.
Filespec recommendations
| • | A-Shell does not recognize spaces in file name, so it is strongly recommended that you avoid them when naming files in other (i.e., host) operating systems. |
| • | The same for apostrophes and quotes. They might work in Windows but will be a nightmare in Linux and of course will not work in A-Shell. |
| • | Obviously slashes are also off limits. Note that that Windows treats / the same as \, but Linux does not. |
