Rewritten July 2022
As its name suggests, A-Shell is a shell program: an environment for running programs which sits above the native operating system and provides additional services to facilitate application development and portability. Like other shell programs, A-Shell presents the user with a prompt, frequently referred to herein as the "dot prompt" since the default prompt consists of a period. At this prompt the user can enter commands for standard operations such as changing directories, execute high-level file operations like DIR, COPY, ERASE, PRINT, etc., set parameters for and retrieve information about the environment, track other processes, and of course run, compile and edit programs. Generically these kinds of commands are known as "shell commands;" but to avoid confusion with other levels and types of shell commands, such as Linux or Windows shell commands, they are referred to in this documentation as "A-Shell System Commands" or just "System Commands".
A-Shell System Commands are actually written in ASB and thus are nearly the same as regular programs except:
| • | The file extension is LIT instead of RUN. |
| • | The default location—i.e., search path—is the SYS: directory, DSK0:[1,4]. |
| • | Although they can be interactive, they typically accept parameters via command line arguments and switches. |
| • | They are executed by name without the need for the RUN, e.g. "DIR" instead of "RUN DIR". |
Additional points:
See the following topics for more details and a complete list of System Commands.
Subtopics
