Chapter 4 - Managing Files and Directories

Abstract

This chapter discusses several commands that are used to manage and maintain files, folders, and floppy disks. Having in-depth knowledge of these commands, their syntax, and their use provides great help when one uses them in batch files or scripts to simplify the administration tasks. The chapter illustrates the traditional Copy, Xcopy, Move, and Del (Erase) commands and provided some examples of their use. Two files—regardless of whether they are identical—can be compared with the help of the Comp command. This command performs a byte-by-byte comparison of the specified files. Another command, FC is an advanced file comparison utility that you can use at the command line to compare files in binary or ASCII mode. This command performs a low-level comparison of the specified files and displays results depending on the parameters used with the command. The Sort command can take as input a file or the output of another command. The Sort command can also take input from the keyboard or from the output of another command. The Recover command can be used to recover files from the bad areas of a hard disk. The Expand utility can be used to extract files from a compressed Windows CAB file and store them in the specified directory on the hard disk. Floppy disks can be duplicated using the Diskcopy command and then one can compare the copied disk to the original disk using the Diskcomp command.