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From: fredex@cg-atla.UUCP (Fred Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Where oh where does my program reside??
Keywords: the and if then where who what when why how question answer
Message-ID: <7808@cg-atla.UUCP>
Date: 24 Oct 89 17:41:08 GMT
References: <1407@sdcc13.ucsd.edu>
Reply-To: fredex@cg-atla.UUCP (Fred Smith)
Organization: Agfa Compugraphic Division
Lines: 34

In article <1407@sdcc13.ucsd.edu> pa1256@sdcc13.ucsd.edu (Jennifer's Lover) writes:
>I have a question regarding how to pull some information out of DOS.
>
>I want to know, regardless of the current directory, what directory
>my program resides in.
>
>This is what Word-Perfect does when it displays the message:
>The system is using C:\WP50.
>
>Can anyone give me a hand??
>
>By the way, I am using Turbo C 2.0 and DOS 3.xx.




At MS(PC)-dos beginning at 3.00, the segment which contains the environment of the
current program also cotains the full pathname of the program
being executed. This is passed thru as argv[0] by Microsoft C. Perhaps Turbo
C does the same.

NOTE that this feature is available only at DOS 3.0 and later. In previous
versions the name or path of the executing program is NOT AVAILABLE.

I have always been told that this information lives immediately following the
environment in your psp. I just looked at it, however, in Microsoft C/Codeview
and in my test case, at least, it actually precedes it. MS C passes a third
argument to main, envp, which points to a pointer to the environment string.
In the case I just checked, the next word following the pointer to the environment
is a pointer to the command head, i.e., the full path of the program executing.

Hope this helps you!

Fred