I am attempting to upgrade from A-Shell v6.4 to v6.5 (soon to be 7.0). I set up a VM running Centos 7 and installed the latest BIN file. I have started testing and so far I've run into three problems:

1. CMD/DO files handle some indented command lines inaccurately. I've separately emailed Jack a few examples of badly misinterpreted A-Shell commands.

2. The format of DIR listings has changed slightly. There is now an extra space between the File Extension and File Size columns. Normally, this wouldn't be significant, but I use hash totals of DIR listings to compare versions of software across systems. The extra spaces result in different hash totals than if they weren't present. This means I can't easily compare v6.4 listings with v6.5.

3. Another minor problem is that DIR/SNAME/LONG/W generates a trailing "I1" if the filename argument contains a * or 1 or more question marks AND if the results span more than 1 screen. The problem disappears if the command is prefixed by "PAGE". (Parts of other command files display stray characters too.)

Thanks for the headsup Steven! Perhaps this would be a good thread to track these sorts of "pain points".

I'm getting a seg fault when compiling with the version. Came from 6.5.1707.1 compile without issue.

I'll second both of those thoughts - thanks to Steven for reporting them and that this may be a good place to organize these kinds of concerns.

1. The first issue I believe is resolved by running UPDCUR from the SYS: directory to update several affected LITs: COPY, ERASE, DIR, PRINT, HEAD, TAIL. (The issue wasn't specific to CMD/DO files -- any command line with leading spaces would have exhibited the behavior. It's just that much more unusual for people to actually type leading spaces in the front of a command line.)

2. The change in the DIR format goes back to May 2019 when the size limits were increased on AMOS-style filename, from 10.3 to 72.8 in A-Shell 6.5.1662. As part of that, the standard DIR output format expanded, by default, to allow 4 character extensions such as HTML, JSON, XLSX, etc. which were becoming a lot more common.

3. I haven't been able to reproduce the trailing "I1" garbage here, possibly because it was fixed in a prior DIR update, or possibly because it is sensitive to a specific set of directory contents. (Steven: if you still get this problem after doing the UPDCUR update, please send me an actual DIR command line and the output results, along with another DIR listing of the entire directory.)

I did UPDCUR in SYS: and BAS:. Many modules were updated or added. I ran into 1 oddity in SYS:

After UPDCUR, I invoked the following command file. After a successful compile, I got the error “?Device not found…”. If I I remove the indentation from the “MOVE” line, the error goes away, but If I insert even 1 blank before the “MOVE” statement, the error returns. (A couple of other command files which previously failed due to indentation now work fine.)

MOVE and COPY are the same command, but I forgot one minor detail (i.e. the need to COPY MOVE.LIT=COPY.LIT after updating COPY.LIT). While fixing that, I also fixed the TAIL issue, so another round of UPDCUR should take care of both.

That did the trick! I am still getting the occasional stray "I1" appearing on my screen (as in the example below), but otherwise A-Shell seems to be functioning well. (PS: I wrote a Dir Listing adjustment program which solved my Dir comparison problem between A-Shell 6.4 and 6.5)

any chance of getting an EFS el6 version?

Let me resolve the known issue reported here first and then I'll circle back and post an updated EFS -el6 version.

Here are the -el6 versions ...

ash-6.5.1711.2-el6.bin
ash-6.5.1711.2-el6-efs.bin