Subj : Re: MS XCOPY v 4DOS internal COPY
To   : Jasen.Betts@xspamp42.f531.n640.z3.f
From : Outsider
Date : Mon Feb 11 2002 10:28 am

From: Outsider@f3.n342.z1.cereal.mv.com (Outsider)
Subject: Re: MS XCOPY v 4DOS internal COPY

From: Outsider <"o?o"@microsoft.com>

Jasen.Betts@xspamp42.f531.n640.z3.fidonet.org wrote:
>

....snipped
> There's certainly a difference in execution time....
> it looks like pipes are much slower.
> strange...
>
> CHEAT!
>
> one of them does "dir C:"
> the other one    "dir C:\"

> well it might have just been a typographical error :)

A typo, rest assured :).

> you had me going for a while... I fixed nopipe so that it matches pipe.
>
> with 4dos the pipe verion is slightly faster, but with command it seems to
> slow right down when it makes pipes - weird.

Probably 4DOS uses real pipes like Unix, than they would be. MSDOS uses temp
files instead which are written to %temp% and deleted immediately afterwards.
My runtimes are as follows: pipe.bat  10.867188 seconds
nopipe.bat 4.781250 seconds

>  O> If you need a good batch timer program, see below.
>
> 4dos has one built in.

That is good, if it is very precise.

> >> try this:   del /z /y /q /s \*.tmp  >&nul
>
>  O> That worked just fine. I didn't know about the "&" in front of nul.
>
> yeah, that's a 4dos thing to redirect stderr (which is most error messages)
> dos has 5 pre-initialised streams for each process,
>
> (useless details follow)
>
>  handle  name    direction           default device
>  0      stdin    in              con  (keyboard/command-line)
>  1      stdout   out             con  (screen)
>  2      stderr   out             con  (screen)
>  3      stdprn   out             prn  (aka lpt1)
>  4      stdaux   both            aux  (aka com1)
>
> all of them which can be redirected using dos (int 21h) functions, but
> command.com only allows redirecting stdin and stdout. 4dos also allows
> redirecting stderr.
>
> Practically nothing uses stdprn, (most progs open "prn" instead) and use of
> stdaux is even rarer, they're only retained for CP/M compatibility AFAIK.

Thanks for the info.

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