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Making Commands Resident

If you have a floppy-based system, we recommend that you make frequently-used commands resident for quick access. Resident commands, which reside in the Amiga's memory, do not require the insertion of the Workbench disk each time the command is used. Use the RESIDENT command to copy a command into the Amiga's memory.

Since resident commands use RAM space, the number of commands you can make resident depends on the amount of RAM in your system. Before making a command resident, use the LIST command to get an approximation of the memory it uses. For example, entering LIST C:COPY produces output similar to this:

Directory "Sys:C" on Monday 15-Jun-92
copy 5496 --p-rwed 03-Jun-92 17:22:02

The size of the file is shown to the right of the file name. The COPY command uses approximately 5.5 KB of RAM if made resident.

To conserve as much memory as possible for your applications, make resident only the AmigaDOS commands and programs that are frequently used and are not built into Workbench. These include ASSIGN, ED, STATUS, Format, and DiskCopy. If you have sufficient memory and you regularly use AmigaDOS, you can also make resident commands that have Workbench equivalents, such as COPY, DELETE, DIR, LIST, MAKEDIR, and RENAME.

Do not make resident commands that are not used often, such as the startup command ADDBUFFERS. The following commands cannot be made resident: BINDDRIVERS, CONCLIP, IPREFS, LOADRESOURCE, LOADWB, and SETPATCH.

For more information on making commands resident, see the RESIDENT command in Chapter 6.

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