With all this information at hand, we can now proceed to examine NextZXOS facilities by task.

Drive cataloguing

It's obvious that simply remembering a file's name and LOADing it, is not possible after the first few files, so we need a command that can help us see which files are stored on a drive. This command is CAT (from CATalogue) and its syntax is as follows:

CAT [-] [#n[,]] [filespec] [EXP]

where - is a switch instructing the file list produced to use the short (8+3) format, #n is a NextZXOS stream for the output of CAT to be redirected to, filespec follows the conventions described in the filenames section earlier and the modifier EXP produces an expanded listing with more information about the files being listed. All CAT parameters are optional and by itself CAT will produce a listing of the default drive which can be set in the same manner as with LOAD, SAVE etc. Try the following:

LOAD "m:"
CAT

You will receive the following on your screen

No files found
   62K free

0 OK, 0:1

Congratulations, you just listed the contents of the RAMdisk. Sadly it's empty! Now type:

LOAD "c:"
CAT

Your display now will look similar to this:

DEMOS                    <DIR>
DOCS                     <DIR>
DOT                      <DIR>
GAMES                    <DIR>
MACHINES                 <DIR>
NEXTZXOS                 <DIR>
RPI                      <DIR>
SRC                      <DIR>
SYS                      <DIR>
TMP                      <DIR>
TOOLS                    <DIR>
LICENSE.MD                   6K
README.MD                    2K
TBBLUE.FW                  168K
TBBLUE.TBU                 465K

 1887M free

0 OK, 0:1

which is a slightly modified listing of the contents of the root folder¹⁴ of your System/Next™ distribution. Now type:

CAT EXP

¹⁴ In filesystems other than IDEDOS and +3DOS that use User Areas, files are organised in an inverted virtual tree of sorts, contained in folders like branches on a trunk of a tree which in turn contain smaller branches and so forth. The top level of the tree is called the root folder or root directory.