What's New ?

This a list of fixed bugs and improvements made :

NOTE : This list is not a complete list of improvements. The changes made
before October 2012 were not included since the version started in this dates
used almost new code.

Friday 11th, October 2012

• Added welcome screen (Two versions).

• Fixed a parsing bug (The Function Dos9_ParseStream() always returned
  NULL).

• Added initialisation routine ( main() ).

• Added support for testing existing files or dirs.

• Added support for current directory.

Thursday 6th, December

• Added support of end of line.

• Added commutator '/n' to the command line.

• Added support for echoing.

• Sorted code files for a better understandability.

Friday 4th, Junuary, 2013

• added several commands (TYPE/MORE, CLS, COLOR, TITLE, GOTO).

• added support for english and french.

Thursday 11th, February

• added api function for file matching (i.e. paths using '*' and '?').

• added function for cross-platform console management.

• added function to extended strings.

Wednesday 20th, February

• fixed many portabiility issues for api.

• api is now cross-platform.

• Dos9 now works pretty well on linux.

• added lot of support for linux.

• fixed a bug with vars under linux.

• thought about use of dynamic files to easily change language.

• Dos9 runs 'Dos9_Auto.bat' at launch, that initializes Variables to be
  Cross-platform.

• Dos9 has now 3 native variables :

• %DOS9_OS% : The operating system that is currently running Dos9.

• %DOS9_VERSION% : The version of the running Dos9.

• %DOS9_PATH% : The path of Dos9 interpreter.

Monday 11th, March

• Solve many portability issues (i.e some programs did not work under
  Linux).

• Reprogrammed whole Man utility, which has been named "dman" to avoid
  confusion on POSIX-compatible Systems.

• DMan is able to run on several platforms natively.

• DMan is more simple to use, since it makes it possible to use links man
  pages.

• Fixed some bugs on BatMan.

• BatMan is now mainly portable.

• Fixed a bug in delayed variable expansion.

Thursday 11th, April

• Corrected support of delayed expansion that didn't match to the way cmd.exe
  parses it.

• Added support of expression evaluating (might migrate to GNU LibMathEval
  soon).

• Added new kind of page support for dMan, it uses now a zip-compressed file
  that contains several pages and saves up disk.

• Added a console-side text editor (an alternative to BatMan), GNU Nano.

• Modified nano to highlight batch code.

• Fixed a bug in a parameter for delayed expansion (cEnableDelayedExpansion
  was not taken account).

Thursday 12th, September

• Added UTF-8 support.

• Added different packages :

• Dos9 Project HLP : A man page viewer.

• Dos9 Project TEA : A simple, fast and tiny text processor.

• Dos9 Project DUMP : A hex-dumper.

• Added i18n support (through GNU gettext).

• Added a README file.

Tuesday 17th, September

• Fixed bug with the message Error : "..." is not recognized as ...
  message in linux version.

• Fixed bug with the wait() function in that made the program hold
  indefinitely.

Thursday 16th, October

• Changed build architecture. Now, the package can be built through a single
  command line, that build all dependencies, i.e.:

  Make -B
  

• Added a lock specifier to the structure STREAMLVL that enables to fix bugs
  with nested redirection levels. Like those that occured running the
  following script:

  IF 1==1 (
   ECHO This goes to file2 
   ECHO This goes to file1 > file 1
   ECHO This goes to file2, again
  ) > file 2
  

• Added a kind of old allocated ESTR structure reuser, that avoid reallocating
  new estr structures. (Saves up speed).

Sunday 27th, October

• Some bug fixes, including a bug that appeared with %~A.

• Added primary support of FOR loops (ie. simple for loop without
  options).

Friday 13th, December

• Solved some bugs in libDos9 (a hazardous non initialized var)

• Added support FOR /F loops with files as input.

Thursday 2nd, January 2014

• Corrected Dos9_ScriptCommand.c bugs in which the delayed expansion was
  not executed even if it was enabled.

• Corrected some manual page

• added some translated pages

• added new make system.

• added expressions (both interger and float mode) for the SET
  /A command.

• added FOR /F loop support with string as input.

• added support for top-level blocks.

Thursday 14th, January

• added final support of FOR /F including the use of command outputs as
  FOR input.

• added DOS9_SEARCH_NO_CURRENT_DIR which does not include the pseudo
  directories '..' and '.'.

• corrected a compatibility bug with cmd.exe: DIR /b returned the
  pseudo directories '..' and '.'.

• corrected an expansion bug with %%~a (and similar var because the
  interpretor missinterpreted the command if, for example %%~ax was badly
  expanded if %%x was not defined). Now, the choosed varaible is the
  largest match defined.

• corrected bug with simple FOR processing.

• added partial support of FOR /R. (Note: this is provided for
  compatibility purpose, and that new scripts should not use theses switches
  any-more.)

• added version information as a header file, making version management
  easier.

• added a function to be executed automatically on exit.

• some minor bug fixes.

• some manual pages enhancement.

Wednesday 15th, January

• fixed a bug that prevented both FOR /R and FOR /D to be executed the
  right way.

• fixed a bug with use of . in file searches.

Friday 17th, January

• Fixed a bug that caused some particular redirections to be misinterpreted,
  particularly, in blocks (echo test>NUL) triggered an error, because
  the output was interpreted to be a redirection to file NUL). This has
  been solved, and both '(' , '|' and '&' operators are know prioritary.

• Modified version information management. Now version are numbered in the
  following way: YYYY.major.minor[tag]. Where :

• YYYY : Is the year the version was released.

• major : The major version of Dos9.

• minor : The minor version of Dos9.

• tag : An optional character, meaning :

  • d : Developer version.

  • b : Beta version.

• Fixed problem with broken make.

• Enhanced features of FILELIST* functions of libDos9. Search is now
  quicker. It also resulted in better execution times of the FOR /R
  function (even though still deprecated).

Monday 20th, January

• Corrected a but that caused line like :: comment & command to execute
  the command command, unlike cmd.exe's behaviour.

• Added REM command and comments manual page.

• Fixed broken make that did not build DUMP command.

• Added endianness support to DUMP command.

• Behaviour of Dos9 is now the same as cmd.exe's one towards block.

• Fixed a bug that required both @ and : signs to be at first column.

• Fixed a bug that prevented redirection to be executed in a top-level block.

• Added copyright notice to all manual pages.

• Fixed a bug with an added extra space with redirection placed at end of
  input line.

Thursday 23th, January

• Fixed a bug with the TITLE command. The TITLE command set a title
  that was the whole command line (including TITLE statement).

• Fixed a bug with the FILELIST features. It now works as expected with
  both '/' (filesystem root sign) and '[driveletter]:/' with windows.

Friday 24th, January

• Started working on an enhanced version of TEA text preprocessor.

Saturday 1st, February

• Final version of TEAv2. Added support for both HTML 5, HTML
  4.01 and xHTML. Others formats have been dropped.

• Fixed a bug with the parsing of command line parameter. If, the final
  parameter was enclosed in quotes (simple or double), it resulted in
  undefined behaviour.

• Fixed a bug that prevented user from include pipes in FOR /F command
  input.

• Enhanced pipe features.

• Fixed a bug that caused the following message

  Error : Unable to release mutex
  

to be printed at exit, due to an undefined behaviour with atexit()
function.

Friday 7th, February

• Fixed a bug of SET /P subcommand. The bug caused a SEGFAULT to be raised
  on execution.

• Fixed a major bug that prevented command search to be executed normally, it
  returned the shortest match available instead of the largest available one.

• Added an error message if the SET command is unable to set environment
  variable.

Wednesday 12th, February

• Fixed a bug of SET /P subcommand, that didn't not removed the carriage
  return at the end of the input.

Thursday 13th, February

• Found a bug that occurs when using CD command from inside a batch
  script, if the path to the script given is relative, Dos9 tries to open
  it in the new current path, and fail, or execute a different script
  depending on circumstances. This is to be fixed in next release (that will
  include a bunch of improvements, like CALL, I hope).

Friday 14th, February

• Started working in version 2014.0.8, a version that will include more
  features, (including use of intelligent help browsing, and improved command
  searching (through a own procedure, instead of what was used previously).

• Fixed a bug with multiple lists in TEA html mode.

• Added own function to search files in path. It is not used everywhere
  though.

Friday 21th, February

• Added support of new threaded function, through a particular header.

• The issue of uncontrolled sub-threads that continued to be executed was a
  major concerns, this is fixed thanks to the new thread functions.

• Solved some errors that occurred when forcing binary input. A few too
  hopeful assumption were corrected, so that the interpretor will not fail if
  a binary file (e.g. randomly generated bytes, such as executables) is
  given as batch script, it will just printf a few (or more) errors messages
  at the prompt.

Monday 24th, February

• Solve a bug that prevented correct %ERROLEVEL% values from being
  correctly used, it used to be ignored when using internal commands.

• Decided of a change in the way to deal with variables, in order to enable
  more compatibility between Dos9 and CMD.exe. The changes resides in
  the way var and special vars are parsed.

On the one hand, to make the difference between the two kind of variables, I
decided the only way to denote a special var (ie. like %%A) is to
prefix it with two percent. Except for variables like %0, %1 and so on,
which can be accessed with a single % for compatibility purposes. This
new conventions provides more stylished script and prevent name clashes,
(ie. unexpected behaviour caused for exemple by the following code) :

    ECHO %1 test%
    :: since spaces in variables names are valid, the result can 
    :: be unexpected depending whether "%1" or "%1 test%" are
    :: expanded first.

On the other, the only way to specify environment variables is the
conventionnal way, with single %. Note that this behaviour has also
changed, undefined variables will be replaced by a void string (they'll be
just stripped from the output).

Finally, in some cases, using %a to specify the special variable will
work either, but well, it can just happen on a very few cases, so that it is
preferable not to use this notation.

• Changed Dos9 behaviour towards %0, ..., %9 variables. Those which
  are not explicitelly specified at startup will be filled with an empty
  string, and will expand to the empty string.

Thursday 25th, February

• Finalized behaviour change for variables. Singles % are now split from
  the input at parsing, exception made for the special variables %0, ...,
  %9 for which the use of a single percent is still valid (for
  compatibility purposes) as stated previously. This prevent users from using
  single '%' to denote a special var other than these specified previously.

• Fixed a bug that made SET /P subfunction to return inconsistent
  %ERRORLEVEL% codes. In fact, it was the reverse of normal behaviour,
  that is :

• Returning -1 on error.

• Returning 0 on success.

• Added an example of batch powered by Dos9, a multifunction caculator using
  both floating point arithmetics and integer arithmetics.

Thursday 6th, March

• Changed the behaviour of the function which decide wether the command is
  multiline or not. It now correctly handles parenthesis that are not
  multiline. For example, the following code used to be expected to continue
  on next lines :

  echo(some test&if 1 equ 1 echo some other test
  

However, this behaviour is not actually resolved, indeed, some error might
occurs (in some very special case) if the previous is run. This is still
to be fixed.

• Added more compatible version of ECHO command. The command now tolerates
  various non-mainstream syntax (ie. using other characters than '.' to force
  print). The following variants are accepted :

  echo!
  echo"
  echo#
  echo$
  echo%
  echo&
  echo'
  echo(
  echo)
  echo*
  echo+
  echo,
  echo-
  echo.
  echo/
  echo[
  echo\
  echo]
  echo^
  echo_
  echo`
  

Most of these syntax are however not recommended, because they can cause
obvious syntax errors, and are only provided for compatibility purposes.

The characters that were given are those specified by the ISO-C 90
standard, so that some locale may provide additional characters.

• Switched to Autoconf build system. This allows more standard builds,
  with GNU build toolchain. It can be compiled through a *NIX-shell
  typing:

  ./configure
  make
  

The install target is not supported yet. It also does not use Automake,
since it is hard to see the point of writing awful Makefile.am in order to
produce a Makefile that can be written by hand.

Friday 7th, March

• Started to work on a safer block determination. This should not be to
  difficult to obtain.

• Started to refresh a large part of the core, which includes rewriting what
  were called modules, and are now just outdated piece of code. I hope those
  changes to be functional within a short delay. It is mainly about getting
  rid of old and ugly pieces of codes i've been writing about two years ago.
  Some function have also been transfered to libDos9, this is limited however,
  since Dos9 is not stable enough to get it in a whole library.

Saturday 8th, March

• Added brand new parser, and also, brand new file reader. The new
  implementations are much more safe and elegant. Lots of repetitions in the
  code have be gathered into singles function to make it more maintainable.

• Silenced Dos9_Jump.c, but hoping to get it works within a short time.

• Added new string search based that take account of escaped-characters (ie.
  Characters preceded by '^').

• Lots of bugfixes, particularly with the new parser and reader.

• Dos9 is much more unstable than it was, but it is to be fixed quickly
  since new version are easier to maintain.

• Changed behaviour of function than are used to get command-line arguments.
  It already did line delayed expansion, but is include now unescaping (ie.
  removing '^'). Thus some syntax have became valid, such as :

  echo ^!test^!
  

This will output !test!, without expanding the variable, even if
test is defined.

It is also important to note that, syntax with escaping and with quotes are
strictly equivalent. As an example, take the following code :

    if foo^ bar equ "foo bar" echo YES

Using, Dos9, the code will output YES. However, cmd.exe will
not. It as been chosen to promote the first syntax since it is more easy to
handle and far less tricky than escaping characters with cmd.exe, which
require an almost random number of '^' to escape some character.

• Optimised Dos9_RunBlock() function.

Wednesday 12th, March

• Changed behaviour of the thread functions of libDos9. The THREAD
  structure now refers to the thread ID rather than to a handle to that
  thread. This new behaviour make it possible to work with thread without left
  a handle on this thread opened. It also enables the stack to contain
  THREAD structures on both *nix and windows.

• Added time-out to the Dos9_WaitForAllThreads function. This is useful in
  case of deadlocks or in case of thread that does not terminate.

• Added Dos9_AbortAllThread function, that kills all remaining thread (only
  those that were launched through Dos9_BeginThread)

• Added Dos9_AbortThread function, that kills a thread.

• fixed a bug in the thread library that sometimes causes Dos9 to wait
  indefinitely, because function Dos9_WaitForAllThread and Dos9_EndThread
  sometimes deadlocked, in a random basis.

• Re-enable GOTO function, that works now (even with cross file
  argument).

• Added TEXT-ANSI target to the tea text processor. It enables
  creation of colourized output using ANSI escapes code. the use of this is
  native in *nix and requires ansicon in windows.

• Fixed a bug that caused infinite loop if the file read was no more
  accessible. It now returns and just prints error message.

• Fixed a bug causing eof not to be detected in some circumstances.

• Fixed a bug that caused an error to be printed in the case that a script
  that was loaded with the GOTO command contained a CD command so that
  the file could not be retrieved because it was kept with a relative path.

Thursday 13th, March

• Fixed bugs with the run functions. The use of program || goto error to
  perform feature test is avaliable for both windows and *nix.

• Fixed bugs with Dos9_SplitPath command in *nix.

• Added a search in %PATH% and %PATHEXT% (only in windows) before
  running any command.

• Added a redirection for command that have .cmd or .bat as extension.
  Those files are now executed by a sub process of Dos9 instead of being
  loaded by cmd.exe.

• Fixed bug with Dos9_GetFilePath function. It prevented executables that
  were in one of the %PATH% directory to be found if a folder with the
  same name was in the same directory.

• Fixed bug with the Dos9_FileExists function from libDos9. It sometimes
  returned true for files that where in the path though not in the current
  directory.

• Fixed a bug with several encapsulated blocks. The previous parser did not
  searched for block after a block was solved (this is is now corrected)

• Improved block support by providing more routines and by making the code
  more efficient.

• Fixed a bug in Dos9_ExpandVar function that was introduced build ago
  when rules for expansion changed. I'm affraid not to have seen it before.

• Fixed a bug with Dos9_EsCpyN function in libDos9. If the functions with
  0 as iSize argument, although the function is expected to produce a void
  string, it failed in windows, thanks to microsoft's crt implementation, that
  throws a SIGSEGV if the last parameter of strncpy is 0.

• Fixed a bug with FOR command. The tokenizer did not behave like it is
  described in the documentation : If several delimiters were encountered in a
  raw, they were not skipped.

• Fixed a bug with the ECHO command. The prompt line (ie. DOS9
  ...>) was displayed whenever the ECHO off flag was set, on direct
  input mode.

• Fixed a bug that caused some commands to print error messages on FOR
  commands. Most notably, the FIND command (or at least, windows's
  implementation) fails if there is no space at end of line, so it added
  automatically now.

• Fixed a bug with SET /A subcommand. It prefixed variable name with a
  space, making the result inconsistent.

• Made the hlp to work again, without problem, since version 0.7 and the
  deep changes made into Dos9 core to get something more modern.

Sunday 16th, March

• Started building a x64 version of Dos9. I experienced troubles because
  of the lack of x64 version of MinGW. However, I managed to get a
  distribution of mingw-w64, the MinGW compiler adapted for x64, in
  the TDM-gcc. The install of libintl (and libiconv, on which libintl
  depends) must be done by downloading packages from GNU ports, and do some
  tricks to get it compiled in the x64 version. This is actually difficult to
  build, and unstable as a did not perform further tests.

• Started profiling the Dos9 code base, looking for making Dos9 more
  fast. The use of gprof has brought several interesting analysis. On the
  one hand, I can't get explanation why is cmd.exe faster for long files,
  although if both are run at the same time, Dos9 perform about twice as
  much commands by second. The things to be updated are:

• Dos9_EsInit and Dos9_EsFree function are far too expensive. It
  sometimes consumes 10% of the global time-run, thus, we removed parts
  of code from the libDos9 library.

• Dos9_GetCommandProc is far too expensive. I'm currently looking for
  an alternative, such as hash function. I haven't found a good one yet
  (however), and i will probably write it by myself.

• I'm also to optimise the execution times of Dos9_String.h. Those
  functions are almost ubiquitous in the code, so that large parts of code
  will benefit from better execution rates. I'm especially targeting
  Dos9_SearchChar and Dos9_SearchToken, that account for a large
  share (about 10% time execution overall).

All those test have be made for normal script optimisation, it was tested
from a file that implement goto, if, set and echo command. I
also performed some tests on for command, as expected, functions that
are the most time consuming are not the same. Though, the functions i listed
before were also much more time consuming than they need to be.

• Improved efficiency of Dos9_String.h and Dos9_Estr.c from the
  libDos9 library. Also disabled some piece of code that ran thread in
  some functions, that basically made them slow down. Dos9 now achieve
  almost equivalent performances in for loops (about 100 lines/s less
  than cmd.exe, without further optimisation), it also reach got
  execution rates at script level (with about 3250 lines/s while cmd.exe runs
  at 2720 lines/s on average). It is surprisingly good because I did not even
  finished optimisation yet, so much better performances can be expected.

• Fixed a bug of IF command. The lss comparison operator was
  interpreted as leq.

Thursday 20th, March

• Started comparisons between GCC optimisation levels.

• Fixed a bug introduced in the function Dos9_SearchLastToken. It appears
  that, on windows, the code runs faster using -O2 than using -O3
  optimisation switches, this might be caused by processor caching, but
  however, this should not be expected to have the same effect on variouss
  platform however. I ended up optimisation operations there, since the
  functions used by gprof account for about 70% of the execution time, so
  that I'm not sure it is reliable now. With gprof version, i've be able
  to achieve speeds of about 3700 l/s, so the result are expected to be at
  least double. In fact, by experimenting, I got only about 4000 l/s,
  which it the speed of cmd on my computer when it consumes about 80%-90%
  of the cpu, in random occasion, because cmd.exe's has really random
  performances. Instead, Dos9 is limited to approximately 25%.

Saturday 23th, March

• Fixed a bug in Dos9_SearchLastChar function.

• Fixed a bug with redirection that was not right dealt with. Dos9 did not
  check whether several block are in a row on the same line.

• Added some functionalities to the cmd/hlp.bat script, which is meant to
  replace old-fashioned hlp manual page viewer. It is basically designed
  to act as a manual page manager rather than just a viewer, by providing
  interfaces to build manual trees, and to get manual tress from the
  repositories at dos9.org (this is to be implemented later).

• Changed names of the manual-pages subdirectories, they now match up with
  traditional *NIX-like local names that are widely used. Note that only
  useful locales should be implemented (at most one for every language).

Tuesday 25th, March

• Implemented replacement for old ENABLE/DISABLEDOS9MODE. Instead of the
  variable, Dos9 provides the CMDLYCORRECT options that can be set
  through SETLOCAL, and that enables more compatibility features for
  cmd.exe.

• Option CMDLYCORRECT now affects FOR loops: If the option is set,
  then all blank lines are to be stripped for the output.

• Changed switch to specify part of lines that are not constituted of switches
  but by text. It is now //, a bit like *NIX's --.

Wednesday 26th, March

• Added a short internal documentation to get help for internal functions.
  These are however much tinier that the full documentation given in HLP.
  This is voluntary, to fit in the executable.

• First implementation of the CALL command is now working. This is
  somewhat blurred because i've not written the full man page now, but it
  seems functional.

• Fixed bug in Makefiles.

• Fixed a file from libDos9 that still used old name CALLSTACK instead of
  stack.

• Found out that in some cases, tea breaks unicode sequences by intruding
  some line feed in the file, This remains to be fixed. This was actually
  fixed quickly.

• Fixed a bug that cause tea to loop infinitely if a word turned out to be
  to wide to fit on a single line. This is now fixed and long words are now
  split in multiple lines.

• Fixed numerous bugs introduced by use of various encoding in the
  documentation, that is, some file were not built by hlp because iconv
  was not able to convert file from erroneous encoding. This has been fixed
  and all pages builds up well with hlp.

• Added a couple of manual pages. It is also combined with new pages and
  translations.

Wednesday 2nd, April

• Implemented aliases within Dos9

• Added ALIAS command.

• Improved robustness of Dos9_AddCommandDynamic.

• Fixed some bugs with CALL function that was not really functional. It
  works much better now, but the features have not been all tested yet.

• Fixed a bug that caused %0 not to be set to the correct value by the
  CALL command. Now, the behaviour is the following:

• if a label was given, %0 contains this label.

• if no label was given, %0 contains the file name.

Tuesday 3rd, April

• Updated build system, so that building Dos9 can allmost be done without
  user intervention. It's as simple as typing the following line:

  make
  

• Switched to version 2014.0.9, because dos9 is becoming pretty
  develloped now.

Monday 7th, April

• Fixed numerous bugs on the GNU/Linux version. Before that update, it
  would have been fairly difficult to make it work. I posted only fixes for
  GNU/Linux, but very few incompatibilities can be expected for BSD based
  operating systems (and anyway, the only BSD based os i've got is NetBSD, so
  that compatibility may not be achieved for other versions. The major fixes
  included are :

• A fix for the autotools build system, indeed, the old
  configure.ac did not appended needed libraries (for examples, there
  was confusions for libintl, that is included in GLibc on
  GNU/linux). I think i'll consider choosing a better build systems,
  because in facts, autotools adds endless complications even for
  building quite simple code. The most Annoying drawback is that in fact,
  you can't use autoconf without using automake, otherwise, some
  bugs are introduced that you'll never hear of reading the documentation.
  Nevertheless, we don't need using automake to generate Makefile that
  we could write, especially when the output Makefile is about hundreds of
  KiB, and is constituted of almost hacks to make it work with make.
  Thus, it's a bit like using a program to produce garbage. autoconf
  provides lots of interesting features, but these advantages are superseded
  by its drawbacks. In particular, the fact that it does not meet the UNIX
  conception standards (e.g. each program should do only do one thing, and
  do it the best), so that the dependencies between apparently distinct
  autotools programs make the developer to use all the autotools
  programs.

• A fix for the Dos9 code itself. The last revisions of Dos9
  included a lot of features that had not been tested on *NIX operating
  systems. So that numerous incompatibilities were introduced along source
  code modification. Mainly, the thread part of libDos9 had been
  left totally untested on real system for versions. I apologize for that, I
  should not have been waiting for such a long time to upgrade. So, fixes in
  the code that have been made are:

  • Make wrapper around undefined symbols coming from windows like
    stricmp (strcasecmp is used instead).

  • Fixed bugs from libDos9/threads, It caused double free exception for
    some errors.

  • Fixed used of strupr in tea. In fact, the symbol for strupr
    that was intended to be used on GNU/Linux was used on Windows
    platforms instead.

  • Fixed incompatibilities in libDos9/file. In fact, default routines
    for *NIX used the functions fopen to check whether a file existed
    or not. The bug was introduced because in many *NIX systems,
    directories are indeed files that can be opened. libDos9 now checks
    for regular files using the lstat function instead.

  • Fixed incompatibilities with environment variables. This issue was
    caused by the fact that environment variables are case-sensitive for
    *NIX operating systems while they are not for Windows systems. In fact,
    Dos9 already capitalized variable names when variables were set,
    however, similar feature was not provided for expansion. This is now
    fixed.

• Fixes on other files, (I mean, on files that are not required in order to
  make Dos9 runing). Those fixes include:

  • Changed the name of the Dos9 executable from Dos9 to dos9.
    This change will have no effect on windows, but it is usual, however, to
    have command executable names in lower characters. I may implement a
    feature for GNU/linux that ignore case for the command line.
    However, I now recommend using uncapitalised characters for command
    name, if you need compatibility, of course.

  • Fixed a bug with the translation system. It used to scan file
    dos9/lang/Dos9_Help.c instead of file dos9/lang/Dos9_Lang.c.

  • Fixed a bug from Dos9_Auto.bat, the current version dit not
    included the path %DOS9_PATH% in the %PATH% variable, that was
    problematic for *NIX systems, however, the Dos9 executable filename
    should be looked up by the program itself, rather than being included in
    %PATH%.

• Changed the way libraries are built. They are now build from within the
  current direction, and they are located in ./lib and headers for
  libraries are located in ./include.

• Fixed a bug in Makefiles that caused the manual pages to be copied in a
  wrong directory (ie. ./bin/share/man instead of
  ./bin/share/man/man that was wrong.

Thursday 10th, April

• Discovered a strange bug with pipes. This bug appears when input have
  several lines, when the pipe is closed, the input is not restored (or, at
  least, the input is not split from stdin). In fact, this should not
  occur since when the pipe is no more redirected, there is no more input
  left. This is strange though, as this problem does not happen with
  single-lines input that appears to work fairly good. It appears that this is
  caused by buffers that are stored internally in the kernel of the operating
  systems. A solution that I might consider is using regular files (instead
  of pipes) to produce somewhat of a pipe effect, because I haven't actually
  found a way to override the problem.

• Fixed a bug with the Dos9_ParseOutput function. It wasn't possible to
  specify 2>&1 and > foo simultaneously, so, you it was not possible
  to specify a redirection for stdin and stdout with truncate
  attribute.

Monday 14th, April

• Added some corrections that make the pipe function quite well on both
  GNU/Linux and Windows architectures (I also tested on NetBSD
  and it worked pretty well, without further tests however).

• Added a few fixes on languages, and I'm starting adding new messages for the
  file commands.

• Checked build on NetBSD. I've found out that Dos9 conforms with
  POSIX.1-2001. Thus, On some platform, if you want to build if, you may
  specify a configuration that defines the _POSIX_C_SOURCE macro, that
  is, type the configure line :

  ./configure CFLAGS='-D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=200112'
  

However, The NetBSD headers does not conform to POSIX.1 and perform
wrong function exposures, so that if you use, it, you might need to specify
_NETBSD_SOURCE macro.

Thursday 17th, April

• Added some translation message in the locale.

• Added new manual pages and lots of fixes in the manual pages.

• Added SHIFT command. It can be really easy to manage argument, now,
  however, I did not preform deep test on the command so that it might still
  be not reliable.

• Added /f switch to ALIAS command. This allows user to redefine
  internal commands and symbols, what was not possible previously. I decided
  to let user override internal commands because I found it to be an
  interesting thing to hack around, allowing to set up replacement commands
  for some batch that needs enhanced compatibility features (although they
  should not need such compatibility features).

• Fixed a bug in Dos9_Thread.c, threads functions were making casts from
  different pointer sizes, ommiting the pointed object were different. Thus,
  writing 8 bytes to a location which was supposed to be 4 bytes long,
  depending on the locations of those data in the executable (and hence
  depending on compilation), it could cause really dangerous errors, such as
  stack corruption for example, in some rare cases. This is now fixed,
  preventing a rare crash to actually occur.

• This is the final build for at least a few months. I'll be very busy in the
  next few month, but I hope i'll be able to submit new fix starting in the
  summer holidays.

Saturday 20th, April

• Fixed a bug that caused Dos9 to crash if either %PATH% or
  %PATHEXT% (only for windows) were not in the command environment.

• Corrected a bug with tea in html mode. The parser did used to escape
  the reserved characters > and < but did not care of &. This bug
  is corrected, enabling html codes to work perfectly well. I hadn't
  noticed it until yet because most recent browsers do not care about such
  errors, preventing error to be easilly triggered.

• Fixed omission of ansicon on the Dos9_Auto.bat, which is launched
  at startup.

Saturday 14th, June

• Following advices of guys for dostips.org, changed the delimiters and the
  way quotes are handled:

• The available delimiters are the following (space),;(tab). This is
  now fully compatible with cmd.exe. I also introduced functions in
  order no to take care of some of them (,;) since they may be used by
  some programs for switches. (The first example I have is gcc, and
  options like:)

      gcc -Wl,import
  

• Changed the way quotes are handled. Quotes have now precedence over
  conditional operators (|&) and command blocks (()). This
  enables to make statements more secure using quotes. The new behaviour
  also conforms to cmd.exe behaviour. Typically, the following code :

      IF foo==foo echo  ") else ("
  

  was understood differently by Dos9 and cmd.exe. Now, the ")
  else (" is considered to be escaped, and is no more interpreted as a
  subcommand of if, as it did before.

• Chosen a standard way to handle quotation marks, an to cut parameter. In
  fact, any delimiter that is between two quotation marks is ignored. So
  that parameters are cut on unquoted delimiters, some example of now valid
  parameters are :

      "simple quotation"
      foo="foo bar"
  

  and so on and so forth...

  If the interpreter finds an unpaired quotation mark, then, the remaining
  characters are considered to be between quotation marks. So that, the
  following examples are equivalent:

      type "some file
      type "some file"
  

• behaviour of function to remove quotation marks in parameters have also
  changed in order to achieve more compatibility with cmd.exe.
  Basically, the algorithm that Dos9 follows when removing parameters
  quotation marks is:

  • If the parameter begin with a quotation mark, then remove it, otherwise,
    stop the algorithm at this step.

  • If the parameter end by a quotation mark, then remove it either. But, do
    not remove it if the parameter does not begin with a quotation mark.

• Cancelled the conversion of Dos9 code to wide char. This was indeed far
  too hard (it implied modifying almost any piece of code), and had little
  advantages (huge incompatibilities between various platform, particularly
  for non-c99 function that are obviously required in order to make thing
  working). Thus, I decided to make a wrapper over libC functions in order to
  be able to use utf-8 internally. This way, I keep the code like it is, and
  preserve compatibility with other platforms (Windows, Linux, NetBSD,
  DragonFly BSD, OpenBSD) and with POSIX. Moreover, this support for unicode
  may easily be removed for platforms that do not handle utf-8, or those that
  do it natively.

Monday 16th, June

• Reorganized the source tree for internal commands. Before that, every file
  of the command subdirectory contained several different commands. I
  found that is was not really practical for maintaining code, the code is now
  split in files that contains each a different internal command.

• Added a functional /Q switch to the RMDIR command. However, it is
  supposed to deal with the /S switch, which is not functional yet.

Thursday 19th, June

• I eventually decided to use the GNU toolchain to compile Dos9. I
  previously expressed lots of criticism toward use of autotools, but libtool
  (which is par of the GNU toolchain) is unfortunately the only program that
  allows developers to deal with libraries (statically or dynamically
  linked) in a platform independent way. This is the best solution I have,
  but if a newer build systems that enables to make such things emerged, I'd
  be glad to move to it.

• Changed some source file name because automake was complaining about
  overlapping objects file names. Some of the name are more logical, but, some
  are not really.

Tuesday 24th, June

• Corrected a bug that prevented local variable (eg. like %1) to be used
  as argument with the call command, thanks to Jo15 from
  batch.xoo.it who reported the error.

• Added local target to Makefile that generates a local installation
  of Dos9 inside the folder ./bin. It is as simple as typing

  make local
  

• Added macros from the gnu gettext package. Also enabled the use of the
  --disable-nls switch for configure.

Friday 29th, August

This is the first time I write something in this file for a long time now.
I've been hacking around Dos9 for a little time now (haaa, holidays). This
is a list of improvements I made during from 24th June to today.

• Changed behaviour of parameter handling routines, valid delimiter are now
  ",; " and tab. The way doubles quotes are handled changed either. An quoted
  expression may be constituted of an arbitrary long string that conforms to
  the following rules :

• Any delimiter is ignored if it is surrounded by double quotes.

• If double quote, is directly preceded or followed by an string characters
  that are not delimiter, this string is part of the parameter.

• And so on and so forth, until we reach unquoted delimiters on both sides
  of the parameter.

Moreover, the quotes are removed if their position conform to the following
rules :

• If a parameter begins with a double quote it will be removed.

• If a parameter ends with a double quote and begin with a double quote,
  both are removed.

• Else, keep the line like this.

• Fixed some autotools options, that where never mentioned under mingw system.

• Fixed incompatibilities with the IF command. Now, the IF command returns
  errors on case of string used as operators for GEQ, GTR LSS,
  LEQ comparants. Moreover, the interpretor is able to handle both
  hexadecimal, decimal and octal bases. Finally, implemented comparants for
  floats (same as integer comparants but prefixed with f), as a Dos9
  extension.

• Fixed issues of compatibility for the SET command. It is mainly a matter of
  quotation marks handling, and typically, the issues for both SET /p and SET
  are fixed, while little issue (not for simple /a assignments of course)
  still exist for the SET /a command.

• Some fixes for the FOR command, now enabling the use of the three numeric
  bases for all the parameters and preventing overflows in FOR /l loops.

• Modified the FOR command in order to accept filename sets to be given as
  input for the FOR /F command. This puts more sense on the "usebackq" option.

• Added a custom environment within Dos9 in order to instaure
  cross-platform syntax capabilities like use of "=" in variable names (which
  is impossible on many systems), to set "=x:" variables for CD command.

• Corrected a bug with SET command, wich displayed system environment while it
  was supposed to display Dos9 custom environment.

• Corrected a bug that prevented the FOR command from getting command input
  under any *nix OS (don't know the actual reason for this, but I
  reimplemented the code using the *nix call fork(), which is, frankly,
  much more convenient than tricky systems to communicate between process
  under windows). The command redirection now works pretty well on any *nix
  system.

• Added a Windows specific new CD command, to be compatible with Windows
  cmd.exe features. The primitive version of CD is still shipped for *nix
  operating systems (concept of disk is a huge non-sense under Unix-like
  operating systems, because they represent filesystems like a binariy tree
  which root is "/", and on which filesystems and devices are mounted as
  directories).

• Fixed a bug, that always caused wrong pid to be awaited if the process was
  forked on time through FOR /F command (with a command input) under *nix
  operating systems, resulting in a mess between commands and commands
  outputs.

• Implemented new functions within libDos9 in order to quickly sort files
  matching to some attributes and file not matching in a single function call.

• Re-implemented the TYPE command to get a command compatible with
  cmd.exe equivalent. The result is very closely compatible except for on
  case of name printing.

• Implemented FIND command as an internal command. It matches closely cmd.exe
  behaviour, except for some inconsistencies I've tried to address (limited
  line length, etc).

• Implemented the %* variable, that have been lacking in the Dos9
  implementation for a very long time (special var are implemented at least
  since 2013). However, there is still little concerns, for example, on
  Unix-like operating system it is impossible to retrieve the original command
  line (arguments are passed separated to the kernel). Thus, the
  Dos9 tries to construct the line back the best it can, by putting
  spaces between the arguments. This is only an issue at startup, though, with
  call, it may not be a problem.

• Changed the version number to 2014.0.9b, I think the interpretor may be
  mature enough to think of a real release in a close time.

Wednesday 3rd, September

• Implemented a new pipe system for Unix-like operating systems (that may
  have broken the good-old WINDOWS implementation, haven't checked yet). It
  uses full power of fork() system call and do not suffer from output
  truncation due to size of kernel's pipe buffer. Also, both command are now
  parallelized, gaining significant execution time in comparison to older
  system. This pipe system does not apply to WINDOWS operating system, which
  will benefit from a new pipe system in little delays.

• Removed padding of arguments with " for external commands, on Unix-like
  operating systems. Indeed, padding " around arguments often cause
  command to fail (precisely, make the command not work the way you are
  intending to).

• Fixed a little issue with the autotools suite. In some Unix-like systems,
  the host triplet was not reported to program. That does not matter a lot,
  anyway.

• Definitely set libDos9 as static by default. It is indeed much more
  convenient (no installation needed on Unix-like operating systems). Some
  may object that it results in bigger executables. But most of time, size is
  not really relevant, and it save setting library search path anyway, thus
  enabling dos9 to be embedded in the a memory stick for example (And yeah,
  size ain't too relevant, because memory stick often have size of few GBs).
  Furthermore, static linking allows compiler to perform further
  optimisations, that can't be done with dynamic linking.

• Fixed some bugs with the SET command that did not use the custom environment
  every time, causing the command to fail.

• Adapted the hlp.bat script to make it work on Unix-like operating systems.
  The new scripts also uses the shift command intensively.

• Fixed some bugs in translations. Removed the en_US local which is almost
  stupid.

Wednesday 24th, September

• Implemented the MORE command as an internal command (why create
  external executables when it is so simple to add little commands to the
  interpretor ?). It includes almost every cmd.exe features, except the
  form-feed expanding features (never seen it used though). However, if you
  build Dos9 with the option --disable-console, you should still
  encounter minor bugs, due to the lack of console capabilities. Finally, I
  thought about replacing MORE with TYPE when building with
  --disable-console, but it would be obviously sad not to benefit from
  this far better and new command.

• Implemented a special stream translation system (for streams like NUL,
  CON, and so on and so forth), to get Unix name of their counterparts. I
  did not implemented the translation for all streams I know, though, but it
  won't be to annoying to be added.

• Corrected a few bugs for Unix-like systems.

Tuesday 2nd, December

• Corrected a bug within the IF command that prevented ELSE IF
  combination to be executed correctly. This was actually caused by a failure
  to match parenthesis the right way. It was basically making only the first
  line of the if block to be executed. Now the bug is solved and the result is
  fully functional.

• Added two features within the MORE command that enable it to accept both
  UTF-8 encoded text and ansi escape codes to be mixed with text.

Thursday 6th, January 2015

• Did some final arrangements that make Dos9 ready to release on the
  GNU/Linux platforms. There is some work left for make it run under Microsoft
  Windows platforms.

• Fixed a little bug of the More command under Microsoft windows.
  MS-Windows does not return line-feed characters using getch() function but
  returns untranslated chariot return (0x0D). This subtleties was not taken
  account by the More command, so that the enter was inactive.

• Changed the way Dos9 command line works; Now it's possible to use
  widespread switches like '/C' or '/K'. The way to tell the interpreter which
  option should be enabled and which should not through the command line has
  also changed.

• Fixed minor issues due to the previous behaviour change of
  Dos9_GetExePath() that affected both FOR command and
  Dos9_RunExternalBatch() function.

• Fixed the broken pipe system introduced by the change of pipe system on
  GNU/Linux (and most of *nices). This is not fully tested though. But the
  new way of handling pipes permits infinite length for both input and output
  of commands.

Tuesday 13th, January 2015

• Fixed an minor issue in the Dos9_SetEnv function that caused some rare
  bugs that made SET command to raise a segfault if it was invoked to
  remove a variable from the environment. It wasn't that frequent because
  usually, variable removal didn't worked, due to another bug. This is now
  fixed.

• Added the START command on Windows, That works pretty well, even if some
  parameters seem to be ignored by windows, such as /Wait. The command
  have few option compared to cmd's version, but, it's a good start point
  anyway.

• Changed the version number to 214.1b, that mean, it's the beta of the first
  stable version which is expected to be released within a short time.

Tuesday 21rd, April

• Fixed a minor issue in the error system for the IF command, the command
  used to exit the interpretor upon minor error.

• Added number of new command to deal with files. Among this command, we have
  MOVE, COPY, DEL, MD, RD and some others.

• Changed the ESTR syntax. I think it is actually easier to access the string
  by using a -> rather than an obscure macro. Moreover, it renders the code
  more simple, it add less symbols.

• Continued French translation.

• New and reviewed man pages. Some manual pages were clearly outdated as some
  had more than two years although the command changed. To clear this out, man
  page content as been revised to be more relevant.

• Added a brand new Dos9 extension to the IF command. I found pretty
  annoying that cmd (and thus Dos9) lacked support for multiple conditions
  for a single if (e.g. logical expressions). Obviously this could have been
  done previously by using the SET command to evaluate an expression but
  this was time- and code-wasting. The interpretor currently supports only
  or and and logical connectors. These are widely sufficient for most
  cases, except some rare cases that requires you to have xor either. This
  is not a big concern, it is just about writing a few more code.

The syntax is pretty simple, but must include blanks around brackets:

• expression or expression : True if one of the two expressions (at
  least) is true.

• expression and expression : True if both expressions are true.

• [ expression ] : Denotes a higher precedence.

As you can see, the syntax is clear but efficient. You can use test that are
provided by the IF command :

• not

• defined, errorlevel, exist

• equ, neq, leq, geq, lss, gtr and derivatives

Note that the IF command only interpret expressions as such if they are
surrounded by brackets, like in this example :

    if [ a equ b ] echo no, seriously ?

Sunday 10th, May

• Some fixes for windows, specially for the CTRL+C handling routines.

Friday 24th, April

• Fixed a few remaining bugs in the implementation of if extended expression.
  As a example, in some case, an or used to be computed as an and.
  These issues are now fixed and the command great.

• Merged tests of the If command. In fact, some test were duplicated in
  different sources, but for maintainability reason, it try to give up with
  the copy and past approach.

• Corrected an issue of the TEA text processor. When producing html
  output, TEA often failed to recognize path that refer to actual other
  TEA based pages and others files. One of the typical issue was that TEA
  sometimes appended ".html" to URIs (that already contained an ".html"
  anyway). Now, TEA also check for protocol prefixes in order to chose
  whether a ".html" suffix should be appended. Recognised protocols are :

• http://

• https://

• mail://

Thursday 7th, May

• Fixed lots of man pages for the Dos9 project. Also fixed some little bugs in
  the TEA text processor, dealing with some sort of ** that where
  mishandled in previous patches.

• Changed regexp implementation after discovery of some bugs (eg "test" was
  not matching "*e*s*"). The new implementation is less faulty and clearer
  to use.

• Added a new /e switch to the FIND command (to produce somewhat
  similar to UNIX's well known grep -e command). It enables use of joker
  expressions on patterns. With this option FIND checks that the entire
  line matches the expression.

Thursday 2nd, June

• Corrected some issues compatibility issue with the newest MinGW version that
  now defines _POSIX_C_SOURCE.

• Fixed a bug with the start command. Apparently, the ShellExecuteEx function
  does care whether or not the filenames passed to it contains forward slashes
  instead of backslashes.

• Added some little info message to the SET command in order to print the
  result of the expression when using /A slash.

Thursday 10th, June

• Added a wrapper to the MORE command to make it display utf-8 text the
  way it is intended to. Indeed windows does not implement implement the
  fputc() function as specified by the standard and considers that it
  receive character instead of bytes.

• Fixed a bug of the MORE command that caused miscomputation of utf-8
  characters number.

Wednesday 13th, Junuary, 2016

• Added support of libcu8, a library designed to handle utf-8 efficiently with
  msvcrt in windows. This is part of a large ongoing effort that attempts to
  make Dos9 more internationalizable. To do so, We had to kind short-circuit
  msvcrt with brand this brand new library. Although still experimental, this
  works quite great.

• Added new CHCP command to handle efficiently the new libcu8 library.

Monday, 25th, Junuary

• Changed version of Dos9 to emphasize the important changes of Dos9 since new
  year 2016.

• Added functions to restrict fd inheritance, to make sure the appropriate fds
  are closed on exec. It is basically usefull for FOR commands.

• Hugely modified the libcu8 to fit with libDos9. It is still an experimental,
  though, but it works way better now.

• Added some new behaviours in file expansion. Now, it is legal to specify
  negative offsets during variable expansion. Quickly, negative offsets refers
  to the absolute value of the offset, counted from the end of the variable.
  For instance, this is now allowed :

  %var:~-2,-1%
  

Thursday, 28th, Junuary

• Added an option that allow using switch catenated with commands, such as

  set/p var=question
  

• Fixed and modified hugely the dump command so that it is way more portable.

Sunday, 7th, February

• Fixed some bugs with the FOR command.

• Fixed some bugs in redirections.

• Fixed little bugs in libcu8.

Thursday 18th, February

• Added the '=' operator for the SET command. The operator do behave a little
  bit differently from cmd.exe's SET, but it is convenient too. For the
  moment, libmatheval only supports explicit number anyway.

Monday 16th, April

• Modified the initialization procedure of Dos9. Dos9 can now handle two
  different startup files:

• $HOME/.dos9/Dos9_Auto.bat : user-specific startup file

• $DOS9_PATH/Dos9_Auto.bat : system-wide startup file

• Fixed some bugs with SET and redirections.

• still develloping dos9ize

• Fixed errors with folders containing spaces for Dos9.

Friday 15th, July

• Fixed a little bug with the for command. When the field "delims=;" is
  specified with FOR without "eol=" being specified, then the character
  ";" is not used as the default end-of-line character.

Wednesday, 14th, September 2016

• Added PUSHD and POPD commands

• Allow to list variable which match with a prefix

Friday 18th, October 2016

• Removed the complex initialisation model set up the 16/04/2016 in favour
  of a single (somewhat read-only) Dos9_Auto.bat initialization script
  that calls automatically local and global custom initialization scripts.

• Worked a lot to improve the binary tree, in order to conform to unix
  installation standard and windows, by the way. This is near to being ready.

• Modified the TYPE command, adding the following features :

• The file names are now echoed thought the standard error output. This new
  behaviour allows sorting out easily file names and file contents. By the
  way this is also more conformant to cmd.exe.

• If no filename is specified, the TYPE command gets it input from the
  standard input, acting quite the same as more.

• Few documentation updates.

Tuesday 26th, October

• Fixed configure.ac bug preventing autotools from properly detect BSD based
  OSes.

• Lots of fixes for the libcu8 library, which was not working properly on
  32-bits platform. The lib now directly asks the location of function using
  the kernel instead on relying on pointers given by the libC.

• Some minor fixes for Dos9 in general.

• Fixed a little hlp bug

Wednesday 26th, October 2016

• Rewrite Pushd and Popd commands.

• Fix some commands help.

Thursday 27th, October

• Change location of gettext files under unices to match the usual file
  layout.

Friday 28th, October

• Fix some compilation errors.

Sunday 30th, October

• Improve pushd command and add documentation.

Tuesday 1st, November

• Fixed some compilation errors with some the stat and findnext functions.

Wednesday 9th, November

• Fixed some minor errors with config.h (basically expansion of datadir)

• Fixed errors.

Wednesday 23th, November

• Fixed compilation error in Dos9_Lang.c.

• Add compilation command in BUILD.readme.

Sunday 4th, December

• Fixed some major bugs submitted by Teddy Astie, for unices. Including :

• Errors in parsing lines containing nested for loops when braces are not
  explicitly specified. eg:

      for /l %%A in (0 1 10) do for /l %%B in (0 1 10) do (
         echo %%A %%B
      )
  

• Cleaned up zombies processes that were not wiped from kernels buffer since
  Dos9 never explicitly specified to throw the data out. Basically, this
  behaviour is particularly shown when repeating for loops. eg:

      :loop
      for /f "delims=: tokens=1,2,3" %%A in ('echo this:is:a_test') do (
          echo %%A %%B %%C
      )
      goto :loop
  

• Changed Dos9 behaviour when getting a SIGINT on Linux. Depending on whether
  a user input or a script is being executed, the interpretor choose to cancel
  the command or to exit.

Monday 5th, December

• Fixed a bug with FIND command, the case sensitive and insensitive features
  were swapped

Wednesday 7th, December

• Correct some words in French (fr_FR) manual.

Monday 30th, Junuary 2017

• Fixed little errors with SET and /a:i switches.

• Fixed delimiters errors for parsing input and conditional operators.

• Fixed errors with gotos, basically omit spaces before labels.

Wednesday 8th, February 2017

• Fixed some bugs with the move command.

Thursday 9th, February

• Fixed a major bug of the IF command. Before that, it had fuzzy behaviour
  with blocks that were part of a later command. Indeed, when combined with a
  command that required a block but which was not enclosed in a block, the
  line was poorly handled, eg:

  if a==a if b==b (
  echo test
  )
  

This example (and its derivatives) should now behave the way it is
intended to, that is, as if it was specified as :

    if a==a (if b==b (
    echo test
    ))

Saturday 12th, February

• Fixed minor bugs with the START command.

• Fixed many manual pages.

• Fixed if dos9 extension bug.

Monday 13th, February

• Fixed libcu8 so that it runs flawlessly under windows XP. The bug consisted
  of a CRITICAL_SECTION that was wrongly initialized. A second bug involving
  libcu8_closedir() as been fixed.

• Fixed errors with the hlp script.

Wednesday 15th, February

• Fixed a lot of memory leaks.

• Fixed libcu8_closedir() function. Indeed, the function did not close
  directory in a correct way.

• Fixed libcu8_dup() functions to handle standard input the right way.

Friday 17th, February

• Fixed libcu8 so that libcu8 ignores invalid utf-8 bytes sequences, instead
  of returning errors.

• Fixed the FOR function freeing function.

• Fixed some manual pages.

Thursday 16th, February

• Update hlp.bat and man.

• Fix a bug with some libc when display the current directory (with Echo
  on).

Wednesday 22th, February

• Added a new feature to the FOR command that allows using regular
  expressions with simple FOR loops. (eg. such syntaxes are now correct)

  for %%a in (*.exe) do echo %%a
  

• Fixed an bug with the GOTO command that prevented error messages from
  being displayed.

• Fixed error of the FOR commands that wrongly omitted goto effects or
  exit /b.

• Modified FOR manual page according to the new features.

• Added /b switch for the START command.

• Added new feature to START command so that it handles empty program name
  in a way similar to what cmd does. (ie. running an instance of cmd /c).

• Added styles to manual pages thanks to styles-sheets provided by Xenoxis.

• Changed libDos9 functions to search files with a totally new implementation.

Saturday 25th, February

• Fixed some errors with libcu8 that was unable to behave properly using pipe
  as it sometimes blocked on input.

• Fixed wrong behaviour of the %* variable which contained all the
  command line, instead of containing only parameters.

• Fixed errors with propagation of environment variables during application
  launch affecting batch and external command launch.

Tuesday 28th, February

• Fixed libcu8 handling of pipe that did not allowed interaction with programs
  such as darkbox.

Thursday 16th, March

• Fixed some error of libcu8. Sped up the library by determining when charset
  conversion is really necessary (ie. do not convert blindly text from utf-8
  to utf-8).

• Fixed some unspecified behaviour with the FOR command. Indeed, when given a
  command as input, the for command would not way for the process to complete
  before continuing in case of encountering GOTOs or EXIT /b command.
  This led to an unnecessary "zombie" process and could easily lead to
  unexpected behaviours since no synchronisation interface was provided by
  Dos9.

This issue has been fixed by forcing Dos9 to wait for the process launched
by FOR to exit before resuming execution. Note that it doesn't change
the overall FOR behaviour, that is, both processes are ran
asynchronously (ie. at the same time), which is different from cmd
behaviour.

Tuesday 21th, March

• Fixed some typos that caused some minor bugs depending on configuration.

• Fixed a minor bug of the DIR command that was not ignoring case when
  dealing with disk letters.

• Fixed a misimplementation of the START command when not using libcu8
  (nor Linux).

• Made the /b switch working with unices.

Wednesday 29th, March

• Fixed some error in file search handling (the origin folder of a static
  string was not added to matches, as if DOS9_DIR_MODE was the default
  behaviour).

Thursday 30th March

• Fixed a bug with FOR command that created more variable that it it was
  necessary when using a joker * as the final token specifier.

• Fixed bug with Dos9_ShowErrorMessage() function that called the dos9
  exit function twice, causing a SEGFAULT.

• Fixed the START command :

• Fixed problems with transmission of Dos9 attributes.

• Fixed handling of the title parameter.

• Fixed an implementation error which resulted in misinterpreted delayed
  expansion when variable name started with a number.

• Fixed block parsing systems.

Sunday 2nd April

• Fixed a compilation error on *NIXes.

Wednesday 5th, March

• Fixed lots of bugs caused by the new parsing system.

• Fixed some errors of the for and call command.

• Fixed the TYPE to make it capable of handling binary files.

Sunday 9th, March

• Fixed the expansion system to behave closely like cmd does. (ie. made two
  distinct level of special var expansion, one for the program parameters and
  one for the other conventional special vars).

• Changed expansion of special var resulting from a FOR to be executed
  before block execution.

• Added a safe CTRL-c handler on windows.

• Merged po files for Dos9.

Wednesday 12th, April

• Fixed incorrect block parsing that did not handled properly escaped new line
  characters that resulted in executing commands as if there was actually more
  commands than there are really.

• Added some error messages and new languages message to be used for CTRL-c
  handler.

• Fixed many typos.

• Fixed plenty of tiny bugs.

Thursday 13th, April

• Added new system that loads the entire script file at once, instead of the
  weird old mechanics that consisted in opening/reading/closing script at
  every new line. This achieve a great performance gain.

• Fixed an error of the Dos9_SetFdInheritance under unices.

• Fixed the goto command to make it able to deal with label that have spaces
  inside them.

• Fixed a bug that prevented i10n to be enabled with simple help modules.

• Fixed some manual pages.

Friday 14th, April

• Fixed some interpretation error with the SET /p command.

• Fixed conditional definition of _X_OPEN_SOURCE.

• Fixed an enormous memory flaw that took place in the inteval libraries and
  caused Dos9 memory consumption to increase dramatically when using SET
  /a intensively

• Fixed typos with i18n.

• Removed unnecessary config.h.in from repository.

• Fixed GOTO command ignoring bAbortCommad.

• Fixed command SHIFT that picked arguments in the wrong local var blocks.

• Fixed Dos9_Auto.bat man page that was in ANSI instead of utf-8.

Tuesday 18th, April

• Added new file searching functions to speed up file search under windows.

• Fixed buffering modes of TYPE and DIR command to speed up functions.

• Fixed issues of both libinteval and libmatheval in determining delimiters.

Thursday 20th, April

• Fixed errors in unicodes files search functions.

• Fixed FIND command for enhanced compatibility with cmd.exe.

• Fixed manual pages.

• Fixed some typos.

Monday 24th, April

• Fixed errors in unicode file searching function and functions.

• Fixed find to make it faster using file buffering potential.

• Fixed the set command.

Friday 5th, May

• Added support for concatenation using '+' with the the COPY command.

• Added better support of variable truncating using numbers when Dos9 is
  explicitly compiled to deal with utf-8.

• Fixed error messages and help messages.

• Fixed manual pages.

Friday 25th, May

• Fixed lots of little bugs

• Fixed handling of stdin with the commands (especially resetting the file
  flags after exit).

• Fixed DEL and RMDIR.

• Fixed File search functions.

• Changed behaviour of the /C and /K switches.

• Added support of more than 10 arguments through the use of the shift command
  and the %+ variable.

• Added WC command.

• Added XARGS command.

• Fixed man pages and i18n messages.

Tuesday 30th, May

• Fixed dir search function for non-unicode and unicode versions.

• Fixed pseudo-directory bug with if exist.

• Fixed rmdir bug.

• Fixed start bug.

• Fixed call bug.

Friday 2nd, June

• Fixed extra newline bug after echo off.

• Fixed errors with pipes.

• Fixed rename and del command.

• Fixed copy command.

• Fixed file search bug for vanilla functions under windows.

Friday 21st, July

• Heavily modified the interpretor that no uses threads instead of of
  separated processes.

• Fix of the set command.

• Lots of bugfixes.

Sunday 3rd, December

• Fixes for path name handling in Dos9_GetMatchFileList

• Added semaphores to fix SET command.

Sunday 1st April, 2018

• Added fixes for Dos9_EsToFullPath().

Sunday 7th, April

• Fixed hlp.bat bug related to the behaviour change of %~pA.

• Fixed bug that caused Dos9 not to append a / after disc in %~dpA.

• Added a /C:MD file to generate html files compatible with pico

Wednesday 11th, April

• Fixed error on handling 2>&1 redirection.

• Fixed Dos9_FilePath.c error that led Dos9 to check for file before
  using %PATHEXT%.

Sunday 23rd, April

• Changed conditional operators and redirections semantics (ie. conditional
  operators now own precedence over redirections, just the regular cmd-way).

• Fixed an error with file search not using libcu8.

• Fixed some typos on english manual.

• Fixed compatibility issue due to msvcrt inconsistent structures name for
  finddata and stat.

Thursday 26th, April

• Fixed some manual pages.

• Fixed additional Dos9_CloseThread() bug on unices.

• Fixed memory leak in Dos9_InitEnv().

• Fixed some FOR commands bug using Dos9_EsToFullPath().

• Fixed some invalid casts in search functions.

Saturday 29th, April

• Fixed a memory leak.

• Changed version to 218.1

• Fixed Dos9_RunExternalCommand() which add a pretty big footprint on
  the stack, sometimes causing stack overflows with Musl libc.

Tuesday 15th, May

• Added new build system based on femto.

• Fixed text files.

• Fixed a great lot of typos.

• Extended documentation.

• Added the possibility of using unix-style switches with tea due to problems
  of mingw that mangled the slash of switches.

• Fixed a bug of the DEL command. If the required file refers to a dir,
  the same behaviour as the one used with DIR is used so that files inside
  that dir get deleted.

Thursday 17th, May

• Fixed CTRC-C handling. Sadly the new multi-thread implementation makes it
  impossible to grab any current directory or modified environment.

Tuesday 22nd, May

• Fixed Mutex locking error in the SET command.

• Modify GOTO and EXIT to leave %ERROLEVEL% unmodified upon
  execution.

• Added the local variable environment creation via SETLOCAL and
  ENDLOCAL.

Wednesday 23rd, May

• Added new manual and functionalities to START. When calling internal
  command with /b option, The command is launched as an internal thread.

• Fixed the CD command that without argument displayed an error message.

• Fixed an error with file redirection inside the FOR command input.

• Fixed set command SEGFAULT error when listing variables. Fixed typos in the
  manual page.

• Added ENDLOCAL manual page.

• Fixed memory leak when duplicating thread environment.

• Fixed parsing errors that misinterpreted 2>&1 as a combination of a
  redirection and the conditional operator &.

• Fixed %~d0 variables. When file modifiers are called on the %0
  argument, the path used is the path of the current executed batch.

• Fixed string search functions handling of escape ^ character. Before,
  two adjacent ^ where misinterpreted as an escape anyway.

• Fixed error with conversion of local var blocks to unicode.

Friday 25th, May

• Added femto-style configuration to libmatheval. Provide a @fnp@ symbol to be
  conformant will preprocessor macros.

• Added tests for -lm.

• Fixed some bad libiconv linking options.

• Fixed a lot of compilation warnings.

Tuesday 29th, May

• Fixed libintl messages directories and initialisation of current locale.

• Fixed COPY command to be more compatible to cmd.exe. The extension is
  only enabled when destination is a folder or ends with a directory
  delimiter.

• Modifyied all commands to provide more detailled errorlevel codes. Allmost
  every command used to return -1 on error, this is not the case anymore.
  Commands now return an %ERRORLEVEL% value equal to the error code
  associated with the message printed.

Wednesday 30th, May

• Fixed if behaviour to be more compatible with cmd.exe. It now supports
  the use of & and | inside the if without specifying additional
  blocks.

• Fixed broken COLOR command.

• Fixed Makefile suite that erroneously linked with -lpthread when linking
  with -lm was necessary. Also fixed makefiles trying to build libcu8 even on
  linux

Friday 1st, June

• Added a brand new editing system to the libcu8 library so that Dos9's utf-8
  versions supports decent editing facilities like hability to insert
  characters in the middle of the input or use history.

• Fixed a bug causing the %* variable to contain the script name if the
  script was launched as a separate thread inside an interpretor.

• Fixed Broken makefiles for linux.

• Fixed Broken console functions for linux.

Wednesday 6th

• Fixed %ERRORLEVEL% variable which is now implemented as a read-only
  variable to avoid polluting child processes environment (especially cmd.exe
  which behaviour gets buggy when errorlevel is defined).

• Fixed SET /A command to be able to specify expression containing spaces.

• Fixed SET default behaviour that provided an extension breaking the
  original command behaviour. The only behaviour used then is the old cmd
  behaviour that truncate the input. Fixed the manual page also.

• Fixed Dos9_RunCommand() and added Dos9_Exec.c to provide a more
  reliable support for external command and the START command.

• Fixed FIND command to provide ErrorLevels compatible with cmd.exe, (ie.
  0 means "match found").

• Modified history behaviour of libcu8.

• Fixed broken thread function preventing correct exit values from being
  reported to parent threads.

• Fixed CALL function to include search in %PATH% and %pathext% if
  available on the system when calling file or batch. Also fixed a bug that
  omitted the 10th parameter if more then 10 parameters were given

• Re coded START command.

• Enabled version 218.2.

Friday 8th

• Fixed segmentation fault happening when calling a batch file with no
  arguments and calling the SHIFT command from within the script
  subsequently.

• Fixed START command to detect batch files extension .bat and
  .cmd and start the appropriate Dos9 interpretor instead of
  cmd.exe by default.

• Fixed build errors under linux.

• Fixed Dos9_RunFile() command to be able to detect failures due to non
  existant file or no executable files under UNIX compatible operating
  systems.

• Introduced the %DOS9_START_SCRIPT% variable which must contain a path
  to a script or a program to handle mymetype associations on Unix compatible
  platform.

• Added URI support to START command.

• Fixed CTRC-C handling under UNIX compatible system.

Monday 11th

• Added line editing capabilities under linux, through the use of a slightly
  modified version of linenoise. Linenoise is tiny library allowing
  console line editing. The license is shipped in COPYING.linenoise.

• Added a big change in the way blocks and FOR and IF commands are
  handled. Now IF and FOR look ahead in the command line to see if
  anything is to be executed using conditional operators. By default, IF
  and FOR swallow everything to the left of the command. That is:

  for %%a in (foo bar) do echo %%a & echo loop
  

is now equivalent to:

    for %%a in (foo bar) do (echo %%a & echo loop)

This behaviour is more compatible with cmd.exe. To override the default
behaviour, please enclose the FOR command inside a command block as
follows:

    (for %%a in (foo bar) do echo %%a) & echo loop

• Incorporated some utf-8 fixes to the linenoise library.

Wednesday 21st

• Added a little fix to prevent dos9 from executing line starting with a
  column after delayed expansion.

• Do not exit when a label is encountered inside a block.

• Fixed START command error when trying to launch an external batch
  script.

Wednesday 27th

• Fixes to the start command.

• Removed used of setlocale() function under windows that create a bug
  with threads.

• Added lots of manual pages.

• Changed the way script are loaded and line executed to be more compatible
  with cmd.exe.

• Fixes to the thread library.

Friday, 29th

• Fixed bug involving pipes and wrongly inherited file descriptors created
  after a call to dup().

Monday 2nd, July

• Implemented hlp's help alias as a part of Dos9_Auto.bat.

• New implementation of the dump command.

• New makefiles for gettext files.

Tuesday 3rd

• Added new target /O:MD for TEA that output markdown files. This is
  very usefull as it helps providing more readable documentations on git
  repositories.

• Fixed build errors for DUMP.

• Added en locale to the po directory and added a few fixes to make
  the translation system easier to handle.

• Updated README file. It is now generated from a template used by the git
  repository and the website so that information can be easily synced. However
  some preprocessing is required in order to remove unnecessary broken links
  from README.tea. README.tea is generated through a template
  README.tpl.

Wednesday 4th

• Added the %~f options to special variables.

• Updated the local variables man pages.

• Fixed a bug with START command. Since the output of dos9_start was
  redirected to NUL, and the process was not awaited, it caused problem
  when either mimeopen or xdg-open was trying to interact with user.
  To fix the problem, the output is no longer redirected and dos9 waits for
  dos9_start completion. This might cause little inconveniences as both
  xdg-open and mimeopen produce some output even when run without
  errors, but this is the only workaround found yet.

Saturday, 7th

• Fixed few errors with the DUMP command.

• Fixed capitalised letters used inside a #include statement in
  Dos9_UnicodeDir.c

• Added translation for Hindi thanks to Karanveer Chouhan (aka kvc).

• Added a tiny test suite system.

• Fixed SET /a bugs reported by DrNuget on the discord conversation. There
  was essentially two bugs:

• the -= operator was mistakenly handled by Dos9 as the /= which
  obviously led to unexpected behaviours.

• Additional spaces between the variable name and the assignment operator
  were not ignored whenever an assignment other than = was specified,
  leading to errors computing the result.

• Fixed a tiny error with femto so that configuration target can be
  specified in a single line.

Sunday 15th

• Modified po Makefiles to stop auto-rebuild problems.

• Modified dir and variables to fix locale date formatting problems and added
  proper setlocale.

Monday 16th

• Fixed a little bug in the Dos9_GetNextBlockBeginEx() function.

• Added PROMPT command and %PROMPT% variable.

• Added the PECHO command which consists of an echo command using prompt
  formats.

• Moved the introduction message to Dos9_Auto.bat.

• Fixes to dos9 variables manual pages.

• Modified COLOR to handle new . extension, which refer to the current
  default color.

• Modified the behaviour of libcu8 history.

Tuesday 17th

• Fixed remaining with msgmerge that was not properly updating the timestanp
  of generated files.

• Changed Dos9_Ask() input source to avoid potential conflicts with
  buffering.

• Added bash-like auto-complete features for windows platforms, still
  experimental though.

• Fixed errors on colors associations to code when using Unix-based operating
  systems. Sadly this means this feature has been broken for quit a long time.

• Added bash-like auto-complete features for Unix-based operating system based
  on linenoise. There is still some concerns that this might be broken on
  platforms with console interraction dissabled.

• Slightly modified Dos9_AskConfirmation() function to be able to
  specify some special input function in order to avoid conflicts with
  standard buffering or raw mode.

Saturday 21st

• Fixed missing inclusion of <stddef.h> in Dos9_Ask.h.</stddef.h>

• Fixed libcu8_read() function problem handling some characters that
  consume more than one monospaced width. Such characters can be found using
  NSimSum font on windows systems (for example, the §).

• Added $P$G as default %PROMPT% value, just in case there is no
  Dos9_Auto.bat script available.

• Added an alternate prompt for multi-line input.

• Fixed missing preprocessor directives inside linenoise/linenoise.c today
  exclude windows targets.

Thursday 24th

• Added the ESC key shortcut to clear the command under windows platforms.

• Added dist makefile target to make a zip of the bin folder when
  called.

Saturday 4th, August

• Fixed few warnings.

• Include Dos9_DirStack.h to Dos9_Core.h.

Monday 6th, August

• Fixed Makefile bug that triggered the build of po sub directory even
  when no-nls was used to configure the femto build suite.

• Fixed CD outdated manual page.

Wednesday 8th

• Fixed a bug causing a segfault when using the DIR command.

Friday 10th

• Implemented a better support to UNC paths. Such paths can not be used by
  CD for now.

Saturday 11th

• Implement a new behaviour for XARGS command. Each line of the input is
  interpreted as a single parameter. Thus whenever a line containing
  delimiters and not surrounded by quotes is encountered, quotes are
  automatically added.

Wednesday 15th

• Fixed documentation errors on Special variable expansions.

Friday 17th

• Added the TIMEOUT command.

• Modified the way Dos9 set locale so that the subject LC_NUMERIC (that
  is, everything refering to numbers) are not affected by the change.

Sunday 19th

• Fixed an error introduced some commit ago that caused file search functions
  that caused a '/' to be added before the '/' root sign when using linux.

• Fixed an error with linenoise custom autocompletion mecanism not adding a
  final '0' character to the line, resulting in buffer overflows.

• Fixes to manual pages.

• Fixes to non-unicode windows version.

• Fixes to manual pages generation systems.

Wednesday 22nd

• Fixed scripts makefiles.

• Fixed a bug with Dos9_AskConfirmation keyboard routine.

Sunday 26th

• Fixed a bug with serialisation of sub process creation. Indeed, as Dos9 is
  multi-threaded, many different process can be creating at nearly the same
  time, causing file inheritance issues with pipes.

• Fixed a bug with history completion.

• Fixed an error with the disk parameter %~d with special variables.

Monday 1st, October

• Fixed a bug where the closing parenthesis was not recognised as a delimiter
  for files names when using redirections.

Wednesday 3rd

• Fixed an annoying bug of the windows version that used autocompletion when
  prompting the user a question, resulting sometimes on unconvienient nested
  user prompts.

• Added a mutex to serialize calls to the ECHO command between subthreads.
  Indeed before this, several simultaneous calls to ECHO resulted in
  interlaced messages, and garbage-like text.

• Fixed an unitialized variable bug in the RMDIR command code.

Thursday 4th

• Fixed redirections not being handled when combined with pipes.

• Fixed shift command bug.

• Fixed an error with special variable expansion.

Thursday 31st

• Added the MOD command and a module toolkit to create simple dynamic link
  modules for Dos9. The object files to build modules can be found in
  modules/lib and a very simple sample module is available in modules/sample.

Sunday 3rd, November

• Fixed a bug of block parsing preventing proper handling of redirections when
  mixed with top-level blocks.

• Slight fixes to MOD and module apis.

• Lots of changes to the console apis of libDos9, changed functions to require
  stream as argument and got rid of the duplicated functions inside Dos9 and
  initialisation functions

• Added an experimental batbox module.

Sunday 11th

• Fixed PAUSE command misuse of Dos9_Getch().

• Fixed omitted thread locale attribute within MORE command code.

• Fixed Dos9_GetVar() and Dos9_UnEscape() functions which happenned to
  be very slow on very large inputs.

• Modified ESTR* lib to extend buffer exponentially rather linearly.

• Added functions to the batbox module.