RE: [dmidecode] Re: dmidecode for DOS?

[Anderson, Ian]

Mea culpa, you are right, do one thing and do it well, sorry I forgot.  Come
think of it, might be a useful to create the program as a learning
experience in C coding....thing I might be able to clean up my own code
contributions.  In the meantime, thanks for the suggestions.

Ian

-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden
[mailto:address@hidden On
Behalf Of Jean Delvare
Sent: September 13, 2005 1:21 PM
To: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [dmidecode] Re: dmidecode for DOS?

Hi Ian,

[Ian Anderson]
> As for the enviromental variables:
> 
> ASSETTAG=`dmidecode -s chassis-asset-tag` SERIALNO=`dmidecode -s 
> chassis-serial-number` MODEL=`dmidecode -s system-product-name`
> 
> echo set assettag=$ASSETTAG > env.bat
> echo set serialno=$SERIALNO >> env.bat echo set model=$MODEL >> 
> env.bat
> 
> does not work under DOS. :(

Of course, this is bourne shell, this is simply not supposed to work under
DOS' command.com. Unfortunately, DOS doesn't exactly qualify as a friendly
scripting environment. Its command interpreter is very poor. At this point
you have two options.

The first possibility is to code the option you need yourself into
dmidecode. Keep in mind though that I will not merge it. This would violate
the Unix rule which states that one tool must do just one thing and do it
well.

The second possibility is to workaround the DOS chronic deficiencies.
This is tricky, and the result is definitely ugly compared to what a Unix
shell allows, but you asked for it.

All you really lack here is an equivalent of Unix' "echo -n". If you had
that, you could do something along these lines:

echo -n set assettag=> env.bat
dmidecode -s chassis-asset-tag>> env.bat echo -n set serialno=>> env.bat
dmidecode -s chassis-serial-number>> env.bat echo -n set model=>> env.bat
dmidecode -s system-product-name>> env.bat

Right?

Maybe FreeDOS provides a more convenient version of "echo" than MS-DOS did,
and has an option equivalent to "-n"?

If not, I searched for solutions and found two. Implementation is up to you.
First solution is to prepare non-newline-terminated files with the strings
you need, and to append them to the generated files at the right time using
"type". Such files can be static [1], or can be generated on the fly using
debug [2]. Second solution is a small DOS binary called ech.com which does
exactly "echo -n" [3].

[1] http://www.ericphelps.com/batch/lines/frag-man.htm
[2] http://www.ericphelps.com/batch/lines/frag-dbg.htm
[3] http://www.lanet.lv/ftp/simtelnet/msdos/pcmag/v12n18.zip

Hope that helps.

--
Jean Delvare


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