🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <DK43vn.Jso@byron.net4.io.org>,
Ambrose Li <acli@byron.net4.io.org> wrote:
>only valid directory separator). If you have played around
>with int 21h calls yourself, you will know that / has always
>been, and still is, a valid directory separator. Every time

Mmmmm, int 21h ax=3701h, dl=new switchar, if you set it to anything but '/',
'/' becomes the path separator and the new switchar works.

But there were problems with this--it was always kludgy from what I saw.
dir/w/p was ok,
dir-w-p wouldn't work.
A few programs were hardwired to accept '/' only, which bites.  Many programs,
e.g., Turbo assembler, use '-'.

>I see a program that rejects / I will conclude that that
>program is broken beyond repair.

Like all of the programs that come with DOS after version 3.3 or 4, at
which time the switchar use was apparently abandoned in favor of
hard-coding '/'.  This can be demonstrated by setting the switch charater
(incidentally, if you look in Borland's stdio.h or maybe dos.h, you will
see a pair of functions, int getswitchar(void) and void setswitchar(int),
which are not documented anywhere, but work, although I've only look at BC++
2.0) under version 5 to anything but '/', and typing dir/w, which will fail,
as will many other utilities that shipped with DOS.  I've tried this under
5.0 and 6.0.

Incidentally, '/' *is* a valid path separator in the Windows 3.1 common
file dialogs, however, overly long filenames are *not* silently truncated
as under dos, 'this_big_file.txt' or 'this.ttttt' give 'invalid filename'
errors. I haven't tried this with the win 95 common dialogs.
-- 
Richard Cooley Extraordinaire | Linux   Linux   Linux | My opinions, not MIT's.
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