Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!oliveb!amdahl!rtech!dosbears!mikel
From: mikel@dosbears.UUCP (Mike Lipsie)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: PATH for Windows applications
Message-ID: <465@dosbears>
Date: 14 Jun 91 05:57:00 GMT
References: <10816@plains.NoDak.edu>
Reply-To: dosbears!mikel@pyramid.com (Mike Lipsie)
Organization: DOS Bears
Lines: 25

In article <10816@plains.NoDak.edu> coffman@plains.NoDak.edu (Clark Coffman) writes:
> [store "home directory" for program in win.ini]
>
>  You know, that would work, but I've always wondered why professional
>programmers don't use argv[0] to find the path! I'm what my friends call
>a sportsman programmer in C and I use argv[0] to find where my programs
>have been started up (so they can find their configuration files).  Why
>don't others use this?  It returns the full path, including the drive,
>to where ever the user has stored your program.  I guess I'm assuming that
>Pascal and other languages have a similar feature?  

It is not a language (C, Pascal, ...) feature.  It is a DOS feature.
In versions of DOS before 3.0, argv[0] is the null string.

If you are writing a piece of code that will run on the most machines
possible ...

Hey!  I bet that there are still machines running DOS 1.x.  (I think I
still have a copy somewhere arounf here.)


--
Mike Lipsie
dosbears!mikel@pyramid.com
mikel%dosbears.uucp@ingres.com