"REN"-like command for changing user ID about cpm65 HOT 2 OPEN

From the user perspective, the cleanest thing would probably to extend REN to take fully qualified names --- so ren 1:newfile=0:oldfile. Except, from the API perspective, CP/M's handling of user numbers is wretched and the underlying BDOS system call doesn't support this.

I did make some attempt to work around the user number stuff with the xfcb library but of course that only works with applications that use it (and it still doesn't support renaming). In general user names are horribly fragile because if you're working with multiple files you need to set the user number correctly before every BDOS call or you can end up with extents on disk with the wrong user number...

The cleanest thing to do would be to change the FCB interface so that the user number was stored in it, but that's a pretty massive API change and is also incompatible with CP/M-80. So far I've been doing what most CP/M developers did and just try to pretend user numbers don't exist!

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Hi,

Perhaps the copy utility could be modified. I don't know if this works or is even supposed to work, but I was thinking along the following lines:

1. open input file
2. save current user number
3. call change user
4. open output file
5. copy stuff
6. change user back to original user

from cpm65.