Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!bnrgate!bwdls58!mlord
From: mlord@bwdls58.bnr.ca (Mark Lord)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: How can I set a PATH longer than 128 bytes ?
Message-ID: <2221@bwdls58.UUCP>
Date: 26 Mar 90 16:54:42 GMT
References: <5762@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM< <90059.112138GILLA@QUCDN.BITNET> <RICHARD.90Mar13153221@church.iesd.auc.dk> <1990Mar14.172308.21398@seri.gov>
Sender: mlord@bwdls58.UUCP
Reply-To: mlord@bwdls58.bnr.ca (Mark Lord)
Organization: Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 22

In article <1990Mar14.172308.21398@seri.gov> marshall@wind55.seri.gov (Marshall L. Buhl) writes:
<<<mlord@bnr-rsc.UUCP (Mark Lord) writes:
<<<<How can I set my dos PATH variable longer than 128 bytes?  I'm running
<<<You need APPENV21.ARC from simtel20.  I use it to set my own 500 byte PATH.
<<                                                              ~~~~~~~~

...extended discussion deleted...

<It is probably more efficient to change the second line to:
<
<   set path=c:\text\wp50;%path%
<
<Since the whole purpose of this batch file is to run WP 5.0, why not
<put it in the beginning of the path so access is faster?

My opinion exactly.  HOWEVER, even using the form:  SET PATH=newdir;%PATH%
is still subject to the 127 character limit (try it!).  To extend beyond this
requires a lot of monkeying around with SUBST, or artificial reorganising 
of directories to what MSDOS can handle, rather than what the user WANTS.

As noted, APPENV21.ARC contains a simple (non-TSR) program to get around
all of this.  There are several other similar utilities around as well.