welcome back to the adventure this is Adam and today we'll be talking about making an
improvement to the operating environment of our system previously we organized our files into
sub directories and explored some tools to manage those files say we wanted to move memy XE to our
apps directory by default boss is expecting that file to be in the DOS directory let's see how dos
responds now let's try to run the mem command that commander file named dos just doesn't know
what happened to the file using the path command we can tell dos where to look for files that way
we don't need to type the absolute path every time now we can try loading MDX e again since we
defined the apps directory in the path dos now knows where to look for more files if it can't
find them in the DOS directory a few notes about the path command if you type in path on its own
the currently defined path will be displayed if you type path equals semicolon all paths will be
removed so there's our current path path equals semicolon and now it says there are no paths so
by default dos knows to look in the docs folder if we type in path equals semicolon dos will no
longer be able to do that now das doesn't know where any files are you can't define multiple
paths by separating them with a semicolon up to 122 characters in length in addition to the 5
used by path equals we can of course add a line to our autoexec.bat file that defines the path
but we have another command to try out first the append command works like paths but it can tell
das where to locate ASCII files as well just like path multiple directories can be defined
by separating them with the semicolon append on its own will display the current path and
append equals semicolon will clear all paths set by a pen so let's take a quick look at how dos
functions right now so I set the path back to the das folder and I tried to type to display
the contents of a file a file that we have in our data directory the das doesn't know where
to find this file because it's not in the das directory this is where we can use a pen now
if we enter the same thing as before this is our first file it displayed the contents of
file 1 dot text I am going to take a minute to add these two lines to our autoexec.bat file
now that das knows where to find files that we want let's check a few tools to help us keep
track of where files are first we can use the tree command this will display the directory structure
on the current drive if we need a little more detail like a list of files in each subdirectory
we can use the switch /f I have not yet found a way to pause or paginate the results of
this command however you can send the output of a command to the printer although be careful some of
these directories do have a significant number of files like the Das directory and can print across
several pages alternatively we can use check disk to see where files are located with the /v switch
a similar problem pause page does not appear to work with this command now we may come to a
point where we want to delete some of these subdirectories if we no longer need them we
can use the Rd command for remove directory but the subdirectory would need to be empty
should we wanted to delete a subdirectory and all of its contents use the del tree
command that will remove the specified directory and any subdirectories without
them being empty I don't have anything to delete right now but we'll circle
back to this when it is time to delete some sub directories that wraps up our
exploration of the path and append command thanks for stopping by see you next video