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From: ericm@ims.UUCP (Eric Martinson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.programmer
Subject: Re: Setting the path variable in autoexec.bat
Keywords: path
Message-ID: <125@ims.UUCP>
Date: 6 Jul 90 21:10:17 GMT
References: <1102@valinor.ACA.MCC.COM> <1990Jun28.211556.10833@Octopus.COM>
Reply-To: ericm@ims.UUCP (Eric Martinson)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Integrated Measurement Systems, Inc., Beaverton, OR
Lines: 38

I have a couple of ways to deal with this problem.  On my system I 
have drive letters C:, D:, E:, F:, and G: which are all hard disk
partitions.  On C: I have a directory named C:\APPS.  In this 
directory I have one subdirectory for each of my applications I
use.  The directories are:

C:\APPS\SP			(Borland Sprint)
C:\APPS\FP			(First Publisher)
C:\APPS\PCTOOLS		(PC Tools Deluxe V6)
C:\APPS\QP			(Borland Quattro Professional)
..
..

The directory names themselves are short (i.e. SP for Sprint
rather than SPRINT.)  The next thing I do is make sure the
line:

LASTDRIVE=Z

is in the CONFIG.SYS file.  Then I use the SUBST command in
by autoexec command to set up a path that gets me one dir
away from all of these applications:

SUBST P: C:\APPS

This allows me to place P:SP;P:FP;P:PCTOOLS;P:QP into the
path and have direct command access to all of these 
applications.

There are ways to increase the size of the PATH variable
using programs that know how to edit the parent environment
but I haven't seen one that's really complete.  I wrote a
simple one that provides no useful interface.  I works.  I
chose the above because several applications croak if the
path is longer than 128 bytes (127 characters plus NULL.)

It's really quite disgusting that DOS has this signed 
byte limit on the length of a command line string.