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From: naga@wet.UUCP (Peter Davidson)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Semicolons in environment variables; mystery revealed.
Message-ID: <1511@wet.UUCP>
Date: 9 Sep 90 23:22:33 GMT
Reply-To: naga@wet.UUCP (Peter Davidson)
Distribution: na
Organization: Wetware Diversions, San Francisco
Lines: 14


 A couple of people kindly sent me email saying that
 SET LIB=\C\LIB;\C\OTHERLIB works just fine for them
and DOS does not treat the semicolon as a command separator. 
This surprised me greatly, since I "discovered" long ago that
DIR;DIR would produce two directory listings.  So I rebooted with
a minimal AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS and (Oh! Amazing!) DIR;DIR
no longer worked.  Turns out that the semicolon effect was due
to the presence of Bryan Higgins' HISTORY utility.  I have long
used this utility to allow me to recover previously entered
commands by using the up-arrow (as in dBASE), and greatly
recommend it.  I now take it for granted so much that I forgot
it was there, and in any case erred in attributing the semicolon
effect to DOS rather than to HISTORY.  Apologies to the net!