v0.0
- Work in progress (and there's a long way to go) *
cpmbox is an attempt to provide a set of unified file management utilities for CP/M 2.2, that are more modern in usage than the original CP/M implementations. This work is inspired by 'BusyBox' for embedded Linux systems, although the design strategy use by BusyBox is neither useful, nor appropriate, for CP/M. The utilities are, or will be, vaguely Unix-y in their names and command lines, although of course some deviations are unavoidable with CP/M. Most obviously, CP/M does not support directories, but does supported drives identified by a letter.
The repository consists of a number of C modules that implement
the various utilities (e..g, ls.c), and a number of supporting
libraries that they share.
At present, the only utilities implemented are cat, cal,
cp, du, find, hexdump, ls,
mv, and untar. I've implemented untar in particular to make
it easier to transfer batches of files using, e.g., XModem.
cat [/p] {files...}
Display one or more text files. Uses paging if /p is set. Wildcards can be
used in the filenames, in which case all matching files will be listed.
cat accepts file redirection, so this is a crude way to copy a file:
cat < sourcefile > targetfile
cp [/v] [/d] {from...} {to}
Copy a file to a file, or multiple files to a drive, or a drive to a drive. For
example: "cp *.c b:" The source files can contain wildcards; if they do, or
there are multiple sources, then the last argument must be a drive, e.g., c:.
If /v (verbose) is given, the utility displays the source and destination
names. With '/d' (dots), it outputs a dot for each sector written.
This can be useful for ensuring that the copy is actually working, with
large files. In CP/M, of course, a "large" file is anything over about 20kB.
cal [/m] {month} {year}
Display a calendar for the specified month. If the year is less than 100, 2000 is added. So 2021 can be written as "21". In a Unix system, this utility would default to displaying the current month's calendar if the user didn't set a date. Unfortunately, CP/M has no standardized way to get the date.
du [/v] [/p] [files...]
Reports disk space used, in sectors and bytes, by the specified
files. The file specification can include drive letters or
wildcards, e.g., du a:*.c. If no files are specified, du reports
file usage on the current drive, in which case its output is similar to
that of the CP/M utility stat. If /v (verbose) is specified,
individual files sizes are shown. /p selects paging mode.
find [/p] {pattern}
Searches all drives for files matching the pattern. /p enables
paging mode. This is highly simplified version of the Unix utility
of the same name; most features of the unix find are either
impossible to implement, or unhelpful, on CP/M.
hexdump [/cmp] [/o offset] [file]
Writes a hex dump of a file or memory. The display is paged if /p is
given. The display starts at the offset given by the /o argument.
If the argument starts with #, it is treated as hexadecimal.
If no file is given, the utility either reads from standard input or,
if /m is given, from memory.
ls [/lpsu] {files or drives...}
Lists the contents of drives. Files are sorted by name order unless /s (size
order) or /u (unsorted) is set. Display will be paged if
/p is set. If filenames
are given on the command line (possibly with wildcards), output is limited
to those files. With '/l' (long), the size and attributes are displayed.
ls is much slower than the built-in dir, but that's partly because
the utility itself has to be loaded from disk. However, the reformatting of
the output to more contemporary layout also takes a lot of CPU cycles.
mv {from} {to}
Rename from to to. Both files must be on the same drive. Broadly the
same as the built in ERASE, except that the command-line syntax is more
modern.
untar [/v] [/t] {file.tar} [drive:]
Unpack a Unix tarfile to a drive. If no drive is specified, the files are unpacked to the current drive. At present, only uncompressed tar files are supported. All tarfile entries other than regular files are ignored; in particular, CP/M has no support for directories, so the structure is flattened.
`/v' (verbose) shows the names of the files being unpacked. '/t' (table) shows the tarfiles contents and sizes, but does not unpack anything. The tar format being what it is, it's not really any quicker to display the contents that at it is to unpack them.
All commands respond to /h (help). Most respond to /p (paging).
Switches must be given before any filename arguments.
Utilities with a page mode operate in the same way as the Unix
more utility. Pressing space shows the next page, pressing
enter the next line, and ctrl+c stops the listing.
All utilities support the Unix-like file redirection operators: > (redirect
output) and < (redirect input). For example, to output a hex dump to a
file
hexdump ... > file.hex
Not all utilities produce sufficient output that this exercise is worthwhile, even if it is supported.
I build CP/M using an emulation environment on a Linux machine, although it will build under CP/M using the Aztec C compiler. I haven't yet provided a way to automate this on CP/M, and figuring out which files make up which utility is rather fiddly, because there are so many components.
I haven't thought about this at all, as yet. Please contact me if you are interested in any of this stuff. Needless to say, no warranty is implied.