Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!ctrsol!ginosko!husc6!ogccse!cvedc!nosun!tektronix!psueea!parsely!bucket!leonard
From: leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Irritating quirks of MS-DOS...
Message-ID: <1592@bucket.UUCP>
Date: 30 Jul 89 06:25:46 GMT
References: <2090@csuna.csun.edu>
Organization: Rick's Home-Grown UNIX; Portland, OR.
Lines: 19

abcscnuk@csuna.csun.edu (Naoto Kimura) writes:

>*   If I type "A:FOO" to run a program or batch file from the A: drive,
>    and such a file doesn't exist on the A: drive, it will search the
>    path for the file and execute whatever it finds, even if it doesn't
>    exist on the drive I specified on the command line.

For what it is worth, this only happens if you use "a:foo". If you use 
"a:\foo" it works the way you want. I rather suspect that it is not
considered a bug by Microsoft. They seem to consiider anything that
doesn't start from the root directory to be a relative path, and in
case a relative path isn't correct, the PATH variable get used. 

I don't say it's *right*, I do say that it is (regrettably) consistent.
-- 
Leonard Erickson		...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard
CIS: [70465,203]
"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools.
Let's start with typewriters." -- Solomon Short