How to Run Your Program at the DOS Prompt

Getting the program’s output is trickier. How you can do it often depends on the precise circumstances of how you are handling the input operations and how much output the program Produces .Let’s examine all the possibilities. First, there are two modes in which you can run a DOS prompt: full screen DOS or DOS in a window. When you click on a DOS prompt, you are in one of these two modes. To switch from one mode to the other, press Alt-Enter. Alt-Enter switch from one mode to the other, toggling between a window version and a full screen version.

When you run a DOS prompt in a window, you are really in a graphics mode; this means if you hit the Print Screen button, the window graphics image is copied onto the Windows clipboard ready to be Edit-Pasted into Paintbrush, for example. With DOS in a window, that image is a bitmap image and can only be pasted into image processing programs like Paintbrush. On the other hand, when you run DOS in full screen mode, you are in a text mode; the Print Screen operation places the text lines onto the Clipboard and which can then be Edit-Pasted into Notepad and printed using File Print. Also when you use the Execute button from the IDE to run your program and if you use the tool bar buttons of the DOS window to select and copy the output text, it is in text mode so that you can paste them into Notepad.

Secondly, there is a big difference between a screen shot done using Print Screen and using DOS redirection to the printer ( > PRN) or redirection to a file to be later viewed (printed) with Notepad ( > a:\results.txt). Screen shots capture the contents of the screen. Appending > PRN or > file to your command line causes DOS to redirect all output of your program to the printer and not to the screen.

What’s the difference? There are some side effects of which you must be aware. If your program is producing a report that contains 30 lines of output, a screen shot is totally unacceptable in all programming classes because you are only going to get the last 24 or so lines, the others scroll off the top of the screen. In this case, you must use the DOS redirection method which sends all output to the printer or a file. However, if you are entering the data values in response to a prompt from the program to enter some data, then the screen shot is the better approach to use because the redirection of output does not redirect a copy of the values you type in for the input operations.

Thus, if a screen shot is desired, Use the Execute button. Choice 1: When the “Press any key” message appears, hit the Print Screen button and paste into Paintbrush or Notepad and print from there. Choice 2: You can use the program’s DOS window’s toolbar or System Menu to “Mark” the portion to be copied and then “Copy” that selected portion to the Clipboard and Edit Paste into Notepad. The procedure is to press the Mark button or bring down the System Menu by pressing the system icon in the upper left corner of the DOS window and choose Edit | Mark. You should see a rectangular blinking cursor in the upper left corner of the DOS window.

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