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This article is from the Computer viruses FAQ, by David Harley D.Harley@icrf.icnet.uk, George Wenzel gwenzel@telusplanet.net and Bruce Burrell bpb@umich.edu with numerous contributions by others.

14) When I do DIR | MORE I see a couple of files with funny names... (Computer virus)

Actually, this is in the Virus-L FAQ. Read that and post the question
to comp.virus or alt.comp.virus if you're still worried. Basically,
the answer is that MORE creates a couple of temporary files, being
considerably less efficient than the Unix utility it attempts to
emulate. Most versions of DOS since the Middle Ages support the
syntax DIR /P, which does the same job less messily. In fact,
if you have a version of DOS later than 5, you might consider
incorporating it into the environment variable DIRCMD, so that it
becomes your default on directory listings which exceed 1 screenful.

Of course, other utilities such as ATTRIB can also be filtered through
MORE like this, which may result in similar symptoms.

 

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