4DOS

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4DOS

A colored directory listing in 4DOS.
Developed by	JP Software
Latest release	7.50.130 (by JPSoft) / August 25, 2004
OS	DOS, Windows
Type	Command shell
License	modified MIT Licence
Website	http://jpsoft.com/

4DOS is a command line interpreter by JP Software, designed to replace the default command interpreter COMMAND.COM in DOS and Windows 95/98/Me. The related 4NT, which replaces Windows NT's command interpreter cmd.exe, is under active development, with the similar 4OS2 replacing IBM's OS/2 command interpreter, for which development has ceased, also available. The Take Command product is available as a compatible interpreter but requiring and taking advantage of a GUI environment (Microsoft Windows or OS/2 PM). 4DOS was written by Rex Conn and Tom Rawson; it was first released in 1989.

1 Features
2 History and current status
3 See also
4 Footnotes
5 External links

Features

4DOS features a number of enhancements when compared to COMMAND.COM:

Additional commands
Extended functionality of existing commands
Extended batch file processing facilities
Improved command line editing, including filename completion and command history
Support for command aliases, also in scripts
Enhanced wildcards and the ability to filter by file sizes, date and time stamps, etcetera
Extended syntax for redirection and piping
Context-specific online help
Colored directory listings
Internal variables and variable functions
A more sophisticated swapping mechanism, yielding more free conventional memory on most systems
An interactive debugger for batch files
A mechanism for creating, maintaining and displaying file descriptions
Configuration stored in an .INI file
Support for the Windows clipboard

History and current status

Originally distributed as shareware, 4DOS has been later released as unsupported freeware. Currently, the source code is available under a modified MIT Licence but it "may not be used in any commercial product without written permission from Rex Conn"^[1] and "it may not be used on any other platform then FreeDOS" so it does not qualify as open source as defined by Open Source Initiative.^[2]. The last update was version 7.50.130, released in August 2004. During its 15-year history, 4DOS underwent numerous updates; here are a few of the most significant.

Version	Released	New features
2.00	February 15, 1989	Original release. Improved command-line editing, filename completion, command history, aliases, improved wildcards, online help, internal variables, swapping to disk or EMS, file descriptions, command separator, key stacker
2.20	July 5, 1989	Executable extensions
3.00	March 7, 1990	BTM batch files (cached to memory for speed), extended memory (XMS) swapping, variable functions, bracket variable-name syntax
4.00	November 1, 1991	Colored directory listings, 4DOS.INI configuration file, include lists, command groups, implied CDD, DOS 5 UMB support
5.00	November 23, 1993	Date, time, and size ranges; compressed batch files
5.51	August 22, 1995	Long filename support, REXX in .BAT and .BTM files
6.00	July 24, 1997	Extended directory searches, interactive configuration (OPTION command), exclusion ranges, interactive batch file debugger
7.00	June 18, 2001	@file lists (as in DR-DOS)
7.50	February 24, 2003	User-defined functions
7.50.1	November 2006	Open source version of 7.50. Luchezar Georgiev has continued developing 4DOS.
7.77	August 31, 2008	Latest version is available at [1].

Some versions of the Norton Utilities for DOS included modified copies of 4DOS called NDOS. The last version of NDOS was bundled with Norton Utilities 8, and corresponded to 4DOS 4.03.