Erwin Waterlander

|WCD| dos2unix/unix2dos| ASM| MinGW libintl| libunistring packages| Man| DosDir| Interesting links| Verjaardagkalender| ZSH for Windows| Rondje Eindhoven| About Erwin|

WCD - Wherever Change Directory

chdir for DOS and Unix, w/C src

Wcd is a command-line program to change directory fast. It saves time typing at the keyboard. One needs to type only a part of a directory name and wcd will jump to it. Wcd has a fast selection method in case of multiple matches and allows aliasing and banning of directories. Wcd also includes a full screen interactive directory tree browser with speed search.

Wcd was modeled after Norton Change Directory (NCD). NCD appeared first in The Norton Utilities, Release 4, for DOS in 1987, published by Peter Norton. NCD was written by Brad Kingsbury.

Examples of wcd usage:
wcd Desk
will change to directory /home/waterlan/Desktop

But also
wcd *top
will do that.

Wcd is free to use and you can get the source code too.

Features of wcd:

  • Full screen interactive directory browser with speed search and zoom in/out.
  • Present the user a list in case of multiple matches.
  • Wildcards *, ? and [SET] supported.
  • Directory stack, push pop.
  • Subdir definition possible. E.g. wcd subdira/subdirb
  • Long directory names support in Win95/98/NT DOS-box
  • Windows LAN UNC paths supported.
  • Change drive and directory at once.
  • Alias directories.
  • Ban directories.
  • Exclude directories.
  • Alternate stack per shell or terminal.
  • Multi user: Jump to folders of your colleagues.
  • Multi platform:
  • Native language support: Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese simplified, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, Friulian, German, Serbian, Spanish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.
  • Unicode Level 3 support (all UCS characters including double width and combining characters).
  • Option to ignore diacritics for Latin-based scripts.

    • WCD is free software, distributed under GNU General Public License, version 2.

    View the README or WHATSNEW or COPYING or FAQ or TODO or PROBLEMS.

    SCREENSHOTS.

    Manual
    Brazilian Portuguese
    Dutch
    English
    French
    German
    Serbian
    Ukrainian

    How to install wcd on DOS, Windows, or OS/2.
    How to build wcd for DOS, Windows, or OS/2 with GCC.
    How to build wcd for DOS, Windows, or OS/2 with Watcom C.
    How to build wcd for Windows with Microsoft Visual C.
    How to build and install wcd on Unix/Linux/Cygwin.

    How to open wcd best match directory in Windows Explorer.

    Download WCD:

    Latest stable version: 6.0.4 Oct 31 2021

    For previous releases see: Old versions of wcd

    Ready-to-Run binaries

    TIP: DOS/Windows with PDCurses interface: Set environment variable PDC_RESTORE_SCREEN so that the screen will be restored after wcd exits. Add this to your autoexec.bat file: set PDC_RESTORE_SCREEN=1

    Binaries of wcd for other platforms are welcome. Send them by e-mail to

    Source Code

    Comments and patches are welcome. Also help with translations is appreciated. If you want to help translating the wcd messages into more languages go to the Translation Project. For UI messages see Wcd messages, and for the manual see Wcd manual

    Latest development version from Git repository:

    Wcd moved to a new Git repository on Dec 21 2015. Check out the new repo with this command:

    git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/wcd/wcd

    Beta version

    There is no beta version at the moment.

    Windows version with ncurses interface.

    The Windows versions of wcd use the PDCurses library for the interface. PDCurses development has been on hold for a long time. It took 10 years to go from version 3.4 (Sep 2008) to version 3.5 (Jan 2018). I have been looking at replacing PDCurses with Ncurses. Ncurses is actively maintained and improving slowly for Windows. Ncurses development focuses mainly on Unix. The main problem of Ncurses on Windows is screen vibration. This can be solved by using werase() instead of wclear(), but when werase() is used, the screen gets filled with garbage when an East-Asian CJK legacy font is used.

    Source code libintl DLL

    The win32 binaries are packaged with with a patched version of MinGW's libintl DLL that has builtin relocation support. See http://waterlan.home.xs4all.nl/libintl.html

    libunistring packages

    See libunistring on how to get libunistring libraries for Cygwin/MinGW/MinGW-w64

    WCD related links

    Old versions of wcd

    Other directory changers

    Notification of new versions

    Want to be notified whenever a new version of WCD arrives? Send an email to with subject wcd add. Write in the email for which operating system you use wcd. (Your e-mail address will only be used for notification of new versions of wcd. It will not be given to any third party.) You will not get a notification of all beta versions, only when there are important changes in a beta release. To remove your e-mail address from the list send an email with subject wcd remove.

    You can also subscribe to the wcd project page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/wcd/. Beta versions are never notified via SourceForge. New releases are announced at freshcode.club.

    dos2unix / unix2dos

    The dos2unix/unix2dos home page has moved to http://waterlan.home.xs4all.nl/dos2unix.html

    Man 1.3

    A 16 bit DOS port of Eli Zaretskii's man clone for DJGPP v2.

    This is a simple `man' clone. It can be used to display Unix man pages, both formatted and unformatted. It can also be used to display pure-text docs, provided that the directory where these files are kept is mentioned in the MANPATH environment variable; this makes it especially suited to the PC environment where typically each program or package come with some kind of text-only documentation.

    A 16 bit 'groff' is currently missing, so unformatted man pages cannot be viewed yet.

    View the README and ChangeLog.

    Get the 'less' pager from the gnuish collection.
    GNUish Project

    DosDir 2.1a

    Download here the latest version of DOSDIR. DOSDIR is freeware. Partly under the GNU General Public Licence conditions.
    It uses the DOS directory framework to provide a portable interface for MS-DOS/UNIX/VMS application programmers. DOSDIR minimizes the OS- specific directory access code for applications allowing programmers to concentrate on the application itself and not on the low-level directory and file structure. DOSDIR applications will run on their native operating systems with the appropriate file syntax and handling, which is expected for that platform.

    DosDir is written by Jason Mathews. View the README.

    Verjaardagkalender

    verjrdag 1.07 (31 januari 2007) - Verjaardagkalender.

    Verjrdag is een eenvoudige verjaardagkalender voor DOS, Windows en Unix. Verjrdag waarschuwt vooraf en achteraf. Het aantal dagen vooraf en achteraf is in te stellen.

    Verjrdag is a simple birthday calendar for DOS, Windows en Unix. Verjrdag warns before and after a birthday. The number of days before and after can be adjusted.

    (Gebruik pkunzip met -d optie.)

    ASM - Another Signal Manager

    The ASM page has moved to http://waterlan.home.xs4all.nl/asm.html

    ZSH for Windows

    Amol Desphande made a native Windows port of zsh. Works also on Windows 9x. UNC paths are supported directly, no mapping to drive letters needed. Here you find the latest version made by Amol. He is not maintaining this any more. His last change was on Jan 27 2001.

    The work of Amol is continued since Jan 2010 in the WinZsh project, with recent updates.

    Interesting links:

    free software programming
    GNU homepage. Project of the Free Software Foundation.
    Cygwin A collection of tools which provide a Linux look and feel environment for Windows.
    MinGW GCC for x86 Windows.
    MinGW-w64 GCC for both x64 & x86 Windows.
    MSYS2 project. Development environment for Windows, including MinGW-w64 with many libraries and utilities.
    DJGPP homepage. Project of a 32 bit DOS version of the Unix GNU C/C++ compiler + utilities
    Open Watcom homepage Free DOS/Windows/OS2 C/C++ and Fortran compiler. Including IDE and debugger.
    Open Watcom V2 homepage Downloadable installers

    The Free Country Free Programmer's Resources.
    Allegro homepage. A game programming library for DJGPP. Graphics, sound, joystick, FLI, timer, etc, etc.
    The GUI Toolkit, Framework Page Libraries for Graphical programming. All platforms.
    Gratis compilers (no payment)
    Digital Mars C and C++ Compilers for Win32, Win16, DOS32 and DOS.
    Freeware (archives, links collections etc.)
    ibiblio.org (was MetaLab (was SunSITE)) Freeware archive
    Games

    I'm a fan of old games from the nineties. My favorite games were/are Doom, Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Command & Conquer, and Command & Conquer Red Alert.

    CnCNet Command & Conquer Red Alert full game for free! Plays on Windows.
    GZDoom Play Doom, Doom2, Heretic, and Hexen on Windows. Requires copy of original game.
    EDuke32 Play Duke Nukem 3D on Windows or Linux. Requires copy of original game.
    DOSBox. Free DOS-emulator for playing old DOS games on Windows and Linux.