Talk:AmigaDOS

Removed section about character sets
I've removed the following section from the article, as it doesn't claim to have anything to do with AmigaDOS in itself, rather being a (non-notable?) particular of AmigaOS in general.

Euro currency character
ISO-8859-1 standard does not support the Euro currency character ("€"), as it was created many years before the introduction of that currency. Modern Amiga character sets includes that character by using ISO-8859-15 (latin-9, latin-0) character set and optionally remapping the keyboard.

Modern Amiga systems like AmigaOS and MorphOS are about to introduce UNICODE as character set, but legacy programs are incapable of supporting it.

MorphOS supports UNICODE internally and uses various character sets to maintain retro-compatibility with ancient Amiga programs.

--LjL (talk) 19:50, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Accuracy in question
This article seems to have multiple errors. Most notable is the claim that AmigaOS4 "finally" introduced long filenames, which gives the casual reader an entirely erroneous impression. The fact is that Amiga has always supported long filenames! When PC users read the claim in the article, they will think that Amiga had 8+3, because that's what PC users had to live with, before they got long filenames. This isn't even remotely true for the Amiga, which never had this limitation. Long filenames under previous filing systems on the Amiga were 30 characters long and imposed no forced form. While that isn't as long as is now possible, Amiga has still always had long filenames that were freely definable. --213.130.255.33 (talk) 13:53, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Amiga filesystems didnt support long filenames until OS4 and MorphOS. You could install 3rd party filesystem (PFS and SFS) which supported long filenames but it was not a standard. It could be mentioned that limitation was in the filesystem and not in AmigaDOS itself. Amiga had support for long filenames since Kickstart 1.0. Xorxos (talk) 11:35, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * 1.2+, 2.x, and 3.x all supported 30 character filenames, which are much longer than the PC 11-character, fixed-format filenames. I'm sure the earlier versions did as well, although I've never had anything lower than WB1.2.  The PC world considers "short" filenames to be of the 8 character +3 extension type, as mentioned above, which would qualify the original AmigaOS/Workbench filenames as being "long", at least in the eyes of a PC user.  And possibly Atari TOS users too.  And C64 users, who had 15-character filenames. Renegrade (talk) 07:20, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

And yes, the article has a number of issues like:
 * the "H" bit must be some MorphOS or OS4 thing. The classic bits are 'sparwed'.  There's no 'h' in 3.1.  While I'm sure it's fair to have the 'h' bit documented, perhaps clarifying the versions involved would be a good idea.  3.1 didn't have H, and 1.2 didn't have S or P either.
 * also the misunderstanding about the "H" bit (if it exists) being "Hide" is likely a PC-ism. Under classical PC systems, "H" means "hidden".  (do "attrib /?" on a PC sometime)
 * OFS can boot a hard drive just fine, it's the Kickstart ROM of 1.x which doesn't understand booting from hard drives.
 * DH0/HD0 aren't always built in. For RDB-based disks, the device name itself is changeable.  This applies to most things that are MOUNTed by something other than ROM.  For example, PC0.  One could rename it to be "A" and have a PC-like experience.
 * Some of the niftier features of the later OSes are omitted, such as the ability to simply type a directory name and have the system changedir there. Ex. typing "df0:fonts" is equivalent to "cd df0:fonts" in WB3.x (and possibly 2.x, but not 1.3-).

Granted, that last point isn't so much an error as an omission... Renegrade (talk) 07:20, 23 February 2011 (UTC)


 * I can not confirm whether "H" bit officially existed in 3.1 but you can use this bit. In Amiga SFS it is used to hide files and directories. This is also likely explanation where misunderstanding of "H" bit is coming from. Xorxos (talk) 11:59, 23 February 2011 (UTC)


 * The H protection bit was most certainly available in 3.x and probably before. However it didn't do anything so was really only of use for files transferred to and from computers using FAT or similar file systems. Actually, now that I think of it, it didn't actually mean "Hidden", but "Hold" which was some signal to keep an executable in memory when used. Edit: I see now that this is already part of the article, so never mind.Daedalus2097 (talk) 12:45, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Wildcards vs regex
In section Wildcard characters the article says "AmigaDOS also provides wildcard characters that are substitutes for any character or any sequence of random characters in a string". Indeed, the shown example ("dir #?.info") is just a regex used to match file/dir names; in the unix world, provided a suitable dir command and shell, it would look like "dir .*\.info". It is not like "dir *.info", as far as I can remember, where the wildcard * is expanded in the shell: it is instead a direct support by the command dir, that accepts a (Amiga) regex as input. So it should be said that "AmigaDOS also provides pattern matching using its own regex syntax". E.g. "dir a#a.inf(o|%)" would list names like a.inf, a.info, aa.inf, aa.info and so on... --Ittakezou0 (talk) 10:29, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

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External links modified
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