Disk Operating system, commonly known as MS-DOS, can be used with a wide variety of computers and storage media, including laptop, portable computers, desktop computers with their 3.5 inch diskettes & hard disk drives. Through MS-DOS, we can communicate with the computer, disk drives, and printer managing these resoureces to our advantage
Microsoft' s MS-DOS is an operating system, Basically, an operating system is a group of programs that act as a translator between you and your computer. when you load MS-DOS into your computer. you can run programs, compose letters and reports, play computer games, and run computer languages. MS-DOS also lets you use devices such as printers and disk drives with your computer.
Program
Any instrution given to a computer can be generally considered as a program. A program can be a one line instruction, an application program or even an operating system program consiist of instructions, written in computer languages. that tell your computer to do something. they have special names and are stored as files on disks. note that an operating system itself is a set of programs. so some programs are a collection of programs. futher, packages are well known as group of programs. in this sense, an operating system is the essential set of programs.
Directory
Files are kept in folders called directories. as in the case of files, a directory is also identified by what we called directory name. you can create many directories under a directory. such directories are called subdirectories. nowadays, the name "folder" is used as a synonym for directory.
It should be noted that directories are used as a way of organizing files in the computer. so you can keep files with different purposes at different directories. all operating system have their own ways of keeping tract of file and directories in relatons to size, data created, access type.
Prompt
Computer always has a mechanism to show that it is ready to accept a command from the user. such an indication is called " prompt". Usually, prompt shows drive name followed by the current working directory. if you are at the top of the directory structure wile in the C drive, prompt would appear like C:\>
The default disk drive is the drive that drive that MS-DOS searches automatically for any filenames you may type. MS-DOS will look for files in the default drive unless you specify a different drive. the default drive letter is always displayed with the MS-DOS prompt.
If your computer has only one drive, that drive is the default disk drive. if your computer has more than one disk drive, you can change the default drive.
Files in MS-DOS
In MS-DOS, files are kept in directories on a disk. These directories also contain information on the size of the files and the dates that they were created and upldated. the directory you are working in is called your working or current directory
An additional system area, called the file allocation table, keeps track of the location of your files on the disk. it also allocates the free space on your disks , so that you can create new files. unless you remove a file from file allocation table it is still in the system. in other words, delete does not mean the removal of the content of a file.
- More DOS Commands
