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From: toma@sail.LABS.TEK.COM (Tom Almy)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.misc
Subject: Re: Thanks and another question about DOS 4.01
Message-ID: <9397@sail.LABS.TEK.COM>
Date: 25 Apr 91 15:09:16 GMT
References: <1991Apr24.193839.22130@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: toma@sail.LABS.TEK.COM (Tom Almy)
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.
Lines: 34

In article <1991Apr24.193839.22130@leland.Stanford.EDU> garygm@leland.Stanford.EDU (Gary Brainin) writes:
>   Anyway, 4.01 is up and running just fine now, except for one thing:
>every time I boot up it tells me that I should be using SHARE.EXE with
>'large media' (my hard drive is 85 meg. or so). [...] What purpose does 
>share.exe serve wrt my hard drive?  I've seen replacements for share.exe (the
>3-line notshare.com comes to mind) - why are these better

(The author of "noshare.com", the original replacement for share, speaks:)

Well they are different, not necessarily better.

The problem occurs when writing to a file using FCBs (an obsolete technique
discouraged by Microsoft), when the file is more than 32 megabytes displaced
into the drive. The disk gets corrupted. SHARE.EXE maps the FCB calls into
acceptable "handle" calls, allowing the old application to run.

The problem with this is two fold: Share takes valuable memory, and some
programs refuse to run if it is loaded (the primary purpose of share is
to maintain file sharing in network applications).

NOSHARE (and the NOTSHARE reverse-engineered rewrite -- it's even smaller
because it frees the environment segment) take a different tact. When a
program attempts to open or create a file using FCBs, the return "file
not found" and "creation error" respectively. Thus the old programs
will not run. You don't need to permanently install this program. Just
throw out the programs that refuse to run, replacing them with more modern
versions. If all your programs run, you can dispense with both NOSHARE and
SHARE.


-- 
Tom Almy
toma@sail.labs.tek.com
Standard Disclaimers Apply