The disk operating system (DOS) that you purchase to run on your personal computer consists primarily of a set of routines that application programs can call upon, together with a facility for loading programs. The various built-in commands like “copy” and “dir” (for “directory”) and the separately supplied commands like “chkdsk” (for “checkdisk”) are just icing on the cake. Given the price, these add-in programs are an extraordinary deal, but many are incredibly primitive. Even worse, DOS can do dangerous things like overwriting a file without first waming you when you copy a file of the same name.
Fortunately, one is not limited to DOS commands. There is a wide array of utilities that replace many of these basic DOS services. I’ll limit my discussion to utilities directly related to the operating system or the disk itself. I won’t discuss editors (the DOS line editor EDLIN is mainly good as ...
