How Do I Delete Lines From a Text File in DOS 7.1?

I found a solution through my own research: STRINGS READ File1.txt,3 > File2.txt ALTER File2.txt "%1 " "" "%1" is the first 4 chracters of the line. It would be nice to know how to remove the first N (unknown) characters, but that is not needed for this project. It would also be nice to know if this can be done without resorting to third party utilities like STRINGS.COM and ALTER.EXE.

If the old program debug is still around, you could use that to write a STRINGS.COM and/or ALTER.COM. That's the closest you're going to get with first party tools. We used to have a few guys who would know enough assembler to do that, but I don't know if any of them are around anymore. How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

As luck would have it, STRINGS comes packaged with its own assembler source code. STRINGS.COM has a rather disturbing limitation. All of the string processing functions become unpredictable or worse when used on strings greater than 110 characters in length, which has left me scratching my head why someone would bother to create it this way. I have found workarounds, but it has been a pain. I notice at the beginning of the source code there is this: ;Equates ; RES_STACK equ offset end_of_resident+512 TRANS_STACK equ offset end_of_code+512 VAR_SIZE equ 128 ;Max size of variables DATABUFF_SIZE equ 2048 ;Size of file data buffer MAX_PARAMS equ 10 ;Max number of parameters DEF_PARSE_CHAR equ "," ;Default parse character Could the solution to this dilemma be as simple as changing VAR_SIZE to 256 or 512? Please opine.

This will work, but assumes that every file you process with this contains only 3 lines. @echo off for /f "tokens=* delims=" %%i in ('type myfile.txt') do set line=%%i set line=%line:~5% echo %line% > myfile.tx Edit: Didn't realize this was for DOS 7.1, which I'm not sure has the /f switch with FOR.

Thanks tonysathre for the bit of code. I'm just beginning to learn the NT command language and every bit helps. As you suspect, MS-DOS does not support FOR /F, and I needed to do this in MS-DOS. STRINGS is a fantastic free program with some very wierd restrictions that I just can't wrap my head around. I can use STRINGS in MS-DOS batch files, but not from the command line. I can use STRINGS from the NT command line (except it won't assign variables) but not in NT batch files. Then there is the ridiculous 110 character restriction which is even more severe in NT. I probably have a copy of MASM 2.0 for DOS sitting around here somewhere, but wondering if I can use Microsoft MASM 8.0 to assemble the MS-DOS binaries. Any opinions on what can be done to enhance STRINGS.COM are greatly appreciated.

Instead of MASM you could you use the built in DEBUG assembler. Tony