Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!samsung!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!news.funet.fi!hydra!kankkune
From: kankkune@cs.Helsinki.FI (Risto Kankkunen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Re: Long command lines
Message-ID: <7214@hydra.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 23 Sep 90 17:39:43 GMT
References: <10522@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1990Sep21.104931.9205@canterbury.ac.nz> <2728@dataio.Data-IO.COM>
Organization: University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science
Lines: 31

In article <2728@dataio.Data-IO.COM> bright@Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) writes:
>A parameter starting with @ is taken to be a 'response file'. The response
>file is read in and inserted into the command line replacing the @filename
>parameter. So far, this is pretty standard. I extended the concept so that
>filename was first searched for in the environment, and then looked for
>on the disk. This avoids the inefficiency of writing and reading files
>when spawning a program. There is no need to reserve a special environment
>variable name.

I don't see this as the final solution, because it is a purely
syntactic, command line convention. What if you use sh, csh, ksh or
some other command interpreter than COMMAND.COM? Those shells may
already have some special meaning for @-character. Or what if you have
a program that wants @-character as one of its parameters? Another
problem is that the command line is passed as a single string instead
of separate arguments.

Passing the arguments at the end of the area for environment variables
would solve these problems: It would not put any character into a
special role, and thus arbitrary strings could be passed to programs.
And because the command line would be broken up into arguments, the
program wouldn't have to parse it (and try to guess what command shell
the user has to do it right).

I think that if we can put the arguments at the end of the environment
with a little hackery, we should start using that. Otherwise we should
get Microsoft to add a new version of exec call that can do it.
-- 
 Risto Kankkunen                   kankkune@cs.Helsinki.FI (Internet)
 Department of Computer Science    rkankkunen@finuh         (Bitnet)
 University of Helsinki, Finland   ..!mcvax!uhecs!kankkune   (UUCP)