They sort of did this with BASIC 4.0 and later for Commodores. We had CATALOG for listing files, SCRATCH for deleting them, HEADER for formatting and so forth. These were standard BASIC commands, and could be used in programs as well as directly.

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icedchai 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Apple also did this with Apple II DOS and ProDOS. There was "cat", "catalog", "rename, "delete", etc. available from the BASIC prompt.

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steve1977 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yup, this basically what you booted into on a C64 for example.

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anyfoo 5 hours ago | parent [-]

No, that was BASIC 2.0, and using any DOS commands was extremely awkward.

With the notable exception of listing the directory, which was pretty easy through a trick from the disk drive’s DOS which meant you could load the disk directory “as a program” with a special name, “$”, and then just LIST it. But you see, the drive’s DOS had to sort of go out of its way to make that simple.

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kid64 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's not a trick. It's just how you list files. Same awkwardness as any other disk command.

	▲	II2II 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If I recall correctly, for Commodores, the equivalent of the disk operating system was handled by the drive itself. If you wanted to do anything beyond a LOAD or a SAVE, you were effectively opening the device then sending a command to the device. The exception was getting a directory, which used the LOAD command (as described earlier) rather than a dedicated command. In my opinion, it is accurate to describe loading a special file in order to retrieve a directory listing as a trick. Looking at the Apple II and Commodore 64, I think it is fair to say that while the BASIC environments supported varying degrees of disk command they were quite different from what we think of as command interpreters. With Unix shells, anything you can enter into a shell script can be executed from the command line, and vice versa. If memory serves me correctly, anything that could be done from the MS/PC-DOS command line could be done from a batch file (though I don't recall if the opposite is true).

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Innittech an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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