Date   : Tue, 23 Jan 1990 20:49:00 MET
From   : Noldus Information Technology bv <NOLDUS%RCL.WAU.NL@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
Subject: Determining disk space in BASIC

I would like to know if there is a possibility to determine the
number of free bytes on a disk from inside a BASIC program on a CP/M
computer.  The type of computers I am talking about are three types of
portable computers: Epson PX-4, Epson PX-8 and Husky Hunter. Further,
the type of disk I mean is a RAM disk.

The CP/M command STAT performs this function but (1) it cannot be
issued from inside BASIC, and (2) STAT produces information on the
screen that I don't want. However, STAT must be using some kind of
CP/M service call and I would like what kind of call or machine code
routine that is. The manual of the Epson PX-8 includes a list of BIOS
services, but none of those concerns disk space. The BASIC function
FRE() returns the amount of free RAM but that's not what I want. I
need the number of bytes available for file storage.

Does anybody know how to do this? Any suggestion is welcome! Thanks in
advance.


        Lucas Noldus, Ph.D.
        Wageningen, The Netherlands
        NOLDUS@RCL.WAU.NL