🚀 go-pugleaf

Several people have noted the fact that the new Mark Williams shell
MSH.PRG (v2.0) seems not to be able to find its profile after the
machine has been booted with GEMBOOT.  The problem is that GEMBOOT
leaves a string in the system path buffer  _shell_p  that MSH cannot
interpret properly.  GEMBOOT seems to follow the conventions of
the PD shell COMMAND.TOS (that was included in the GEMSOFT
distribution) in which semicolons are used to separate paths.  Thus,
when I looked at that string after booting with GEMBOOT it contained
"PATH=;C:\".  (This is from memory; there might have been another
semicolon somewhere.)  MSH uses commas to separate path strings.
My guess is that MSH tried to open its profile file on device ";C:"
and of course got a TOS error.

A cure seems to be to change the path buffer to "PATH=" followed
by two zero bytes.  A program to do that can be run as one of the
programs in the .BAT file that is invoked by COMMAND.TOS (which
is in turn run by GEMBOOT).  MSH then starts up properly.  I will
post a simple C program that does this after I have tested things
a little more thoroughly.

--Mike Fischer
        Arpanet:  fischer@yale.arpa
        Bitnet:   fischer@yale-cs
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