Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!midway!ncar!boulder!seri!wind55!marshall From: marshall@wind55.seri.gov (Marshall L. Buhl) Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.misc Subject: Re: MS-DOS 3.30A and "SHELL=" in CONFIG.SYS (SLOWness) Message-ID: Date: 19 Oct 90 22:20:34 GMT References: <652@seer.UUCP> <4848@navy22.UUCP> Sender: news@seri.gov (news) Distribution: na Organization: Solar Energy Research Institute Lines: 32 koch@motcid.UUCP (Clifton Koch) writes: >>>>Does anyone else think that 160 bytes of environment space is ludicrous? >> > 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 It's the same for 3.2. If you're using 3.1, you enter the environment in 16 byte paragraphs. The shell statement for 512 byte environments would then be: SHELL=COMMAND.COM /P /E=32 If I remember correctly, this was an undocumented feature in 3.1. If you're using DOS 2 or 3.0, you should have upgraded long ago. ;-) >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. My DOS 4 manual says the limit is 32K. I don't use any other switches. -- Marshall L. Buhl, Jr. EMAIL: marshall@seri.gov Senior Computer Missionary VOICE: (303)231-1014 Wind Research Branch 1617 Cole Blvd., Golden, CO 80401-3393 Solar Energy Research Institute Solar - safe energy for a healthy future