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From: tom@netmbx.UUCP (Thomas Filz)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.misc
Subject: Re: MS-DOS 3.30A and "SHELL=" in CONFIG.SYS (SLOWness)
Message-ID: <1236@netmbx.UUCP>
Date: 16 Oct 90 23:34:53 GMT
References: <1990Oct12.224956.21168@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <9849@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>
Organization: netmbx, Berlin, West Germany
Lines: 24

pilger@uhunix1.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Eric Pilger) writes:

>Actually, my path seems to be limited to ~120 bytes, after which it
>truncates.  Yet another anomoly of DOS that is no end of an annoyance.

Hey, why would anybody want such a long path? Ever thought about the time 
you would save with a shorter path and a batch directory for calling all
those application programs? 

Do you know what happens every time you issue an external command?
Dos searches every single directory listed in your path and in case you
didn't spell your command quite as it should have been, this might take
some time. So limiting the number of directories in your path might make
the time waiting for the "unknown command" message a lot shorter.

So if you want all those hundreds of programs on your disk directly 
accessible why don't you create a directory containing lots of batchfiles
to do this job?

The path can thus be limited to three entries: DOS, BATCH and one for 
all those small utilities. Great isn't it? :-O

Have fun!  
Thomas Filz