AmigaDOS to Windows CMD/DOS Reference
Recently acquiring an Amiga has lead me to realise that not all command prompts are equal. *NIX shells aside, I had expected *DOS prompts to act on a standard set of commands... turns out I was gravely mistaken!
One imporant point: When copying from Windows, long filenames will have a '~1' at the end. The 'tilde', to AmigaDOS, is actually a wildcard. So when you're deleting, etc... it'll match ALL THE BLOODY FILES and delete them all on you. Therefore, when copying to Amiga, make sure that all filenames are in the old-school 8.3 format. See more on pattern matching here.
Therefore, I present to you the following reference guide. I've provided the mapping, where possible, between standard Microsoft *DOS commands and their equivalent AmigaDOS commands. Find a full list of available commands here.
Microsoft DOS | AmigaDOS | Notes |
---|---|---|
cd .. | cd / | Slash is not the root folder! |
cd dir_name | dir_name | You can actually just type the directory name. This makes perfect sense, as you cannot have a file the same name, so it just changes to that directory! |
copy A.txt B.txt | copy A.txt TO b.txt | Note the TO |
copy A.txt other_dir\B.txt | copy A.txt TO otherdir/b.txt | Slashes are reversed! |
copy ..\A.txt . | copy /A.txt TO A.txt | Single-slash to get to parent directory |
copy x:\zz.txt . | copy x:zz.txt TO zz.txt | Note that drives are rarely one character on Amiga |
copy z:\docs\readme.txt . | copy z:docs/readme.txt TO readme.txt | No need for a '/' start after the drive colon |
dir *.txt | dir #?.txt | Yes, the wildcard is #? |
dir /p | list | Amiga dir doesn't format any other way. Use list. |
Good luck.