Hi Jeremiah.

Some days ago I needed to compare a pair of long text files. I tried
using the OpenDOS FC but it reported "line exceeding the maximum of
255 chars".  Ouch! I then remembered the FreeDOS FC and tried it but I
had a lot of strange answers.

Having the source code I can take a look inside and fix it!

What to say? I was surprised by the brevity of the program but I was
also astonished. That program was so buggy, badly coded and
inefficient! Just a little sample to show the point:

  - The line counter is very incorrectly updated and is completely
    useless.
  
  - All the memory dinamically allocated (especially each text line)
  is NEVER deallocated.
  
  - There is a (very short) limit to the line length but there is no
  check to avoid crashes. The program simply continue to write...
  
  - The ASCII file can't contain any ^Z or NULL char.
  
  ...etc. etc.

Ok: I hate C, but anyway let's try to make it a little better.  Only
after some hour of work I had a doubt: how can a program so bad have a
so sophisticated ASCII comparison engine? Me idiot! Answer: it hasn't!
The ASCII comparison engine is TRIVIAL. Nothing to do with the DOS
"FC" command (as expected and stated) or the unix "diff". At most it
can be compared with the old "COMP" DOS command or "cmp" unix command.

Resuming: Sorry to say this to someone who did all this for enthusiasm
and gave it to the community for free, but the program doesn't do what
it is supposed to, and even what it does is very poorly done. Ok, it's
a beta version, but that is insufficient even for an aplha one. I hope
the remaining of FreeDOS is better!

My program isn't perfect either but I think it's a little better than
the original.

Do whatever you want with it. At this point I lost all the interest in
that program. I hoped the big work was already done. I have no time to
spend reinventing the wheel and fighting with C. If I should decide to
do it anyway I'll take a look at the literature on the subject and
then I'll do from scratch in Pascal.

Cheers
        Maurizio Spagni <flurmy@comune.re.it>