THISIS~1.BAS                  1K

 1887M free
This Is A Hello World Program.ba
s                             1K

 1887M free

0 OK, 0:1

you'll notice that the long filename This Is A Hello World Program.bas got truncated to its first 6 characters after trimming all space characters followed by a tilde ~ character and the number 1. This is to help differentiate from other files with long filenames that look alike in the first 8 characters of their filename (omitting spaces). To demonstrate this, type:

SAVE "This Is A Hello United Kingdom
Program.bas"

and

SAVE "This Is A.bas"

followed by

CAT - "th*.bas"

The resulting display will now be:

THISIS~1.BAS                  1K
THISIS~2.BAS                  1K
THISISA .BAS                  1K

 1887M free

0 OK, 0:1

As you can see a ~2 was added to the This Is A Hello United Kingdom Program.bas filename when it was shortened otherwise you couldn't differentiate it from the This Is A Hello World Program.bas as they both share the same starting characters. As a matter of fact NextZXOS when faced with a lot of similar filenames will keep adding consecutive numbers truncating the original filename further until all the files are displayed in short format. If you now use CAT with EXP you'll get to see a number of things. First, if you don't have a Real Time Clock module installed, you will see that all the files you just saved have the same date and time on them and secondly that in the second column, the second character from the left has turned into a from a single dash (-). This signifies that the archive attribute has been set. CAT becomes more powerful with the use of wildcards, allowing us to get a list of only the files we're interested in, omitting all others that may clutter our display. For example:

CAT "*.tap"

will show us all the .tap format tape image files, we have stored in the current drive and folder.

Thus far we have only displayed the ability to list files contained within the current drive and folder, however CAT can display files in different drives, folders, user areas or a combination of the above (when the combination is supported by the filesystem of the drive). We can instruct CAT to produce listings of files and folders inside drives other than our current drive or folder or even user area without having to change our default filespec to that specific area. We'll cover the subject of changing the default filespec shortly so for now here are some examples:
CAT "m:" Displays a list of all files in drive m:
CAT "2m:" Displays a list of all files in user area 2 of drive m: