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26Jul/160

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.

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