Free disk space

In some instances, you may want to see how much space exists on a disk before writing a program to it. The ? command exists for this purpose. This command is entered from the command line. The syntax is:

    ?drive-specification
The `drive-specification' is a single letter between A and P indicating one of the allowed drives or partitions. The letter may be upper case or lower case. If the indicated drive is properly connected to the computer, stedi will respond with the number of bytes that are still available for writing on this drive. On systems where partitions may be indicated with names of more than one character one should of course specify the entire name. On UNIX systems this command is not available. One should instead use the appropriate ! command (like `!quota -v' or `!df drive' in the cshell).

Example:

    ?a or ?A
This command gives the number of free bytes on the diskette in drive A.

The ? command is useful when it is not clear whether a file will fit on a diskette. In that case one can find the size of the file to be written with the = command and compare this with the space on the diskette.

If the answer to a request for the amount of free diskspace is the message "Drive not connected." there is no record in the systems variables that the requested drive exists.