Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!rutgers!apple!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!motcid!koch
From: koch@motcid.UUCP (Clifton Koch)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.misc
Subject: Re: MS-DOS 3.30A and "SHELL=" in CONFIG.SYS (SLOWness)
Message-ID: <4848@navy22.UUCP>
Date: 17 Oct 90 21:04:03 GMT
References: <652@seer.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Motorola Inc., Cellular Infrastructure Div., Arlington Heights, IL
Lines: 21

>>>Does anyone else think that 160 bytes of environment space is ludicrous?
>>>My path can be longer than that.
>>>
>>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.
> 
> Actually, the culprit is the DOS command line, which is 127 characters
> long.  If you can feed info into a PROMPT without using the command line,
> DOS has room for at least twice that much.
> 
  The culprit is usually the environment space, which is defaulted to 127
characters.  This is the area that stores the path, prompt, any set 
something=something_else type commands.  If you have dos 3.3 (I think thats
the cutoff, but 3.2 may also have the shell feature) you can use the SHELL=
comand in config.sys to increase the environment space.  I think the line
I use is:
SHELL=COMMAND.COM /P /E=512 

There may be a switch or two I'm missing, but the 512 is giving 512 bytes
of environment space, and I believe it can go to 64K, if you really feel
like it.  The /P option makes the shell the permanent one.