Dos is very cumbersome

While out at my moms today I was looking around for a virus scanner for her, since her trial version ran out for f-prot. I use the linux version for all my computers as it is free for home use. The windows version you have to pay for.. But being me this didnt seem like a good thing to buy since she hardly uses the computer. The DOS version is free and still being updated, but lacks some of the nice features. The biggest of these being auto update of the virus definitons. A hour of work to wrap my head around the whole batch file thing and DOS again (I dont know how I lived with out auto complete, and history for so long). Here is a nice way to auto update your f-prot version of DOS from f-prot’s ftp site.

I started with making a files.ftp text file that looked something like this:

files.ftp

cd pub
get fp-def.zip
get macrdef2.zip
quit

This might not make to much sense to you right now, but this next file should clear it up if you know DOS at all. The next file to make is a update.bat, that looked like this:

update.bat

ftp -s:files.ftp -A ftp.f-prot.com
pkunzip -o fp-def.zip C:\f-prot\
pkunzip -o macrdef2.zip C:\f-prot\
del *.zip

This is all setup so that I have the DOS f-prot install at “C:\f-prot\” and the two files for my update script located at “C:\f-prot\update\”. It all works well and can just be added to Task Schedular on my moms little 98SE box. Depending on your install of f-prot for DOS you will have to change this a little, but if you get what I just posted it should be simple. Hope this helps some people out or atleast just shows that you can still automate stuff with out a nice shell like BASH… But BASH sure does make it nice and clean to do way more complex stuff. It was fun to to dig around in the DOS command line for a little today and actually make something worth while for the setup here. :)