A user emailed me with what they thought was a bug, but to me it looks like everything is okay. Ironically, I think it's QBASIC that has the issue.
Here's the "bug" as described to me: The user ran PC Tools on FreeDOS and navigated around. They exited PC Tools into a directory (BAS_DAT) that contained their QBASIC source files. When you exit PC Tools, it sets the working directory to whatever location you were in last (in this case, the "BAS_DAT" directory). That's when they discovered that "BAS_DAT" was showing in the DOS prompt as "BAS_DAT " (that's "BAS_DAT" with an extra space after it) Running QBASIC from that directory fails (immediately brings up an error dialog saying "Bad file name" even though QBASIC was run without arguments). *Aside: I thought QBASIC would only run on MS-DOS, but I checked the screenshot the user sent me; it's really MS-DOS QBASIC, not QuickBASIC or something else. And the series of screenshots they sent indicated QBASIC was running on FreeDOS. So I guess QBASIC doesn't mind running on non-MS DOS? That is an interesting bug, to be sure. I downloaded and installed PC Tools Pro 9 (10-9-1993) (3.5-1.44mb) [English-International] (3.5-1.44mb) from https://winworldpc.com/ on FreeDOS (with QEMU) and was able to reproduce the symptom. But the issue appears to be inherent to PC Tools - and then a problem with QBASIC not recognizing a space-padded path like it should (interesting to find a bug in MS-DOS QBASIC, though). I think what is happening is, upon exit, PC Tools "fills out" the DOS working directory path to 8.3 with spaces. So the "BAS_DAT" directory is actually "BAS_DAT" plus one space (plus an unused extension). That's where the mystery space is coming from. But the filesystem hasn't been modified, it's just how PC Tools sets the working directory when it exits. In my case, I was able to reproduce the problem using a directory called "AMB". After I exited PC Tools, it showed on the prompt's path as "AMB" plus 5 spaces. But I could still (successfully) launch FreeDOS EDIT from there, and use EDIT to open a file in that directory (both as a command line arg to EDIT, and by starting EDIT then loading the file). Backing up one directory, I can see the directory entry in the filesystem hasn't actually changed; it's still "AMB" without the spaces (using DIR/W will put directory names in brackets, making any spaces easy to see). So ultimately, this isn't a FreeDOS bug. PC Tools is exiting to a directory and padding the working directory path with spaces. And then QBASIC is panicking because the working directory is space padded now. But the path isn't actually space padded, as you can see if you go back one directory. Curious if anyone else has tested PC Tools on FreeDOS (or MS-DOS) and if you see similar behavior. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
