utils

This is a repository for some little, nifty and useful utilities that I decided to develop for MSX. There are some Unix-like utilities, and some utilities which can take advantage of Nextor. All of them are written in Turbo Pascal 3.0, using libraries developed by Kari Lammassaari and PopolonY2K. All the libraries are stripped to the minimum (MSX doesn't have plenty of RAM to play with), they are in this repository and has the .INC extension in its names.

Note: All the commands' parameters can be known using the /h parameter (from help).

pwd

Returns the current path.

'nuff said.

shuf

Shuffles the lines fron a given file.

I decided to do it first, because of the challenge and I can use most of the adquired knowledge into other utilities.

grep

Search for patterns into a given file.

It uses the Boyer-Moore string search algorithm, which is really fast, even for an old 3,58 Mhz Z80. Amazing! TODO: It finds the first occurrence of a string into the line. We need to show all matches.

cat

Sends a file to the standard output.

tac

Sends a file in reverse order to the standard output.

Unfortunately, I don't know if there's a way of speed up the file read, 'cause Pascal textfiles read routines can't use seek functions. So, I won't change the code.

rev

Reverse lines characterwise.

'nuff said.

head

Prints the first n lines (or n bytes) from a given file. If you doesn't use any parameters, it will print the first ten lines.

tail

Prints the last n lines (or n bytes) from a given file. If you doesn't use any parameters, it will print the last ten lines.

wc

Counts how many bytes, characters, words and lines from a given file. If you doesn't use any parameters, it will print lines, words and bytes.

sleep

ttime (time)

dos2unix

unix2dos

drvhelp

devhelp

maphelp

lsblk

zeroaloc

Sets reduced allocation information mode for any drives in Nextor. Faster and more useful than RALLOC.

Here you can download a ZIP package with all COM files.

TODO

All of them demands optimization, in order to use bigger files in a faster way. I'll do it in the future.

Version notes.

(c) 2020-2024 Brazilian MSX Crew. Some rights reserved, but it's released due to the GPL license, so... You know. Suggestions, corrections and upgrades are welcome. But if you think that all my work is garbage and I should learn Z80 Assembly because you think it's better... GTH (Go To Hell). BTW, I'd send your opinion to /dev/null.