Need help Getting Up To Speed with ProDOS on Apple II

[Retronaut]

Hey, I'm prepping to make a video on Apple II ProDOS and as a first step I am trying to become familiar with the specifics of the DOS. I have noticed that pathnames are a thing and getting to a file can often require a fully qualified path, going from the volume-name onwards. Fair enough....

Having formatted a disk (using Filer) I had volume names which were a bit long, and as these are required to be typed in, I thought it would be good to rename these volumes to make the names shorter and therefor easier to work with. For this I used the Volume Rename util, and, this is odd, when I rename, it shows the current name in the text field, which is OK, BUT it also won't let me press space to delete any characters from it. I understand DELETE is not a thing on Apple II, so AFAIK the only way to delete characters is to replace them with spaces, right?

So right now, lets say my volume name is MONKEYGRINDER, I can only change it to a string with the same length. I can't shorten it. And this is proving to be a PITA.

So, that aside, I checked in with the great Google AI and asked, can I do this from BASIC and it says yes and shows the syntax on how to to this.

RENAME /OLDNAME / NEWNAME

But this does not work. I am assuming that (as per usual) the AI has been huffing authority gas again and is talking nonsense. So should this work? Im' guessing not?

Cheers

Retronaut

 

[colinmcmillen]

You can't change volume names from the ProDOS "shell". You can do it with the ProDOS Utilities or Filer disk.
Also I think the syntax is `RENAME OLDNAME,NEWNAME` for files.

From the Filer and most text-UI programs, you delete characters by going left, typing new chars to overwrite the existing one, and hit Enter. The characters under and after the cursor are discarded. (Only from ProDOS 2.4.3, which is out since December 2023, is there support for the Delete key on the computers that have it available).

This document will probably help you a lot better than AI for your video http://www.applelogic.org/files/PRODOSUM.pdf

 

[Retronaut]

Thanks, no, thats the trick. Did not realise that everything under the cursor onwards would be discarded.