program system command

Syntax

program system keyword

Send commands to the operating system.

Note

As with all program commands, use of the command word program is optional; program system and system are both valid.

This command allows the user to access the underlying command-driven operating system (DOS, under Windows). The contents of s and other string tokens are passed directly to the system, and the text output is redirected to the screen. Some common commands used in place of s are dir, copy, del, etc. The following optional keywords apply.

s ...

If a string is given, this will be passed directly to the operating system. Multiple strings will be concatenated and passed as multiple tokens.

clone keyword ...

If the clone keyword is given, then a clone of the current program is spawned.

s ...

The contents of s are passed as arguments to the executable.

timeout i

Wait for i seconds for the process to complete before shutting down the process and moving on. If i = -1, the code will wait forever. If i = 0, the code will spawn the process and move on immediately, leaving the process to run in parallel. In this last case, text output from the program will not be captured. This option can be used with either the s option or the clone option.

copy sfrom sto

Operating system independent command to copy the file sfrom to sto. A warning is issued and the copy operation is unsuccessful if any of the following conditions is met: sfrom does not exist; sto exists; the directory to copy the file to does not exist.

delete s

Operating system independent command to delete the file s.

Warning

Do not use these commands to modify files that the code is currently reading.