🚀 go-pugleaf

Have more than one path statement, where
the second statement references the first as %%PATH%%%PATH% .

In article <1941@v7fs1.UUCP> sv@v7fs1.UUCP (Steve Verity) writes:
>
>I want to have a path that is almost 150 characters long.  Unfortunately,
>DOS truncates the path I specify in my autoexec, if it gets too long.
>
>There must be a work around, no?
>

Yes! There is. The environment used by DOS is a function of the shell, COMMAND.COM
There is a switch for command.com /E:<n> where n specifies the environment size.
This can be up to 32767 bytes in length. To do this at boot up put the line
SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM /E:1024 /P

The /P is needed to make the fisrt copy of command "permenant" and force it to
load autoexec.bat.  Since the default environment size is 128 bytes your path
exceeds that limit....


Steve

In article <1941@v7fs1.UUCP> sv@v7fs1.UUCP (Steve Verity) writes:
>
>I want to have a path that is almost 150 characters long.  Unfortunately,
>DOS truncates the path I specify in my autoexec, if it gets too long.
>
>There must be a work around, no?
>
>

Yes, Steve, there is a work-around.

The problem is that DOS only allows 128 chars on the commmand line.
The solution is to abbreviate individual paths so that a large number
can fit in 128 chars.  Suppose, for brevity's sake, that you want to
include only two individual paths in the PATH environment variable:

subst f: c:\program\dos
subst g: c:\program\win386

path=f:;g:;

You have to tell DOS to allocate space for these "device handles" (f,g),
by including lastdrive=[letter] e.g.  

lastdrive=z

in config.sys.  Note that 26 (a-z) drive handles is all you get.

This is something of a bastardization of the SUBST command.
IBM/Microsoft introduced SUBST with hard drives.  It was designed to
fool older applications that were not hard disk aware.  So, if your copy
of PeachTree G/L looked for data on drive B:, DOS could fool it into
looking in a particular directory on the hard drive instead:    

subst b: c:\data\peach

Ross Porter
rossp@calvin.cs.mcgill.ca

In article <1990Mar10.165143.20886@Octopus.COM>, stever@Octopus.COM
(Steve Resnick ) writes:
>
>I want to have a path that is almost 150 characters long.  Unfortunately,
>DOS truncates the path I specify in my autoexec, if it gets too long.
>
>There must be a work around, no?
>

	DOS has a 60-character limit on paths, if I remember correctly.

	Keep in mind that when you specify a path, the computer will search
through ALL of the directories you specify (in order) to look for a
command (filename) that you type.  a 150-character path is IMMENSE! 
Your system response time will be lousy.

	A better idea than increasing the length of the path string is to put
just three or four directories in your path (your misc. utilities
directory, your DOS stuff, your root dir if necessary, and a directory
full of batch files for all the other programs that you use and would
want in your path.  If, for instancs, you have WordPerfect in a
directory called C:\WP50, then you can make a batch file called WP.BAT
that contains the two lines:

	cd \wp50
	wp %1

	And stick it in your batch file directory.  That way, you type WP, it
looks through two or three dirs (instead of 15 or 16) finds the batch
file, and off you go into WP.  If your batch file directory is the first
one in the path, you only have to look in one dir to hit the batch file,
and your system response time disappears.  If you do this for all of
your programs that require that their directory be in the path, you'll
make your life a lot easier.

	If you have any questions about batch file language look in your DOS
manual or write me directly and I'll assist as best I can.

						- Ken

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Ken Hoover [ consp21@bingsuns.pod.binghamton.edu | consp21@bingvaxa.BITNET ]
     Senior undergraduate consultant, SUNY-Binghamton Computer Center
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