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From: ericf@uwvax.UUCP (Eric Feigenson)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Re: HELP: How to increase ENV space?
Message-ID: <399@uwvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 15-Nov-85 10:11:52 EST
Article-I.D.: uwvax.399
Posted: Fri Nov 15 10:11:52 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 16-Nov-85 03:49:30 EST
References: <215@ur-tut.UUCP> <1869@watdcsu.UUCP>
Distribution: net
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 38

> If you look in the DOS 3.00 manual under the SET command, it says
> "If you have *not* loaded a program that remains resident... DOS expands
> the environment string area to hold additional strings."  Otherwise it
> only has the default 127 bytes.
> 
> There are two approaches: either do a SET in your autoexec *before* any
> resident utilities (SideKick, keyboard typeahead expanders, ramdisks, etc)
> are loaded.  This SET (or series of SETs) should increase the space to some
> high limit.  You can always get rid of these placeholders variables after
> you've loaded other stuff above them.
> 
> The other approach is to patch COMMAND.COM; there was a patch posted to
> the net a while back (sorry, I don't have it around any more) to do is,
> but it tends to be highly version-dependent.
> 
> 				

I beg to differ.  I have had similar problems with DOS 2.1, 3.0 and 3.1.
In my autoexec.bat file I set ALL my environment variables, path and prompt,
*before* I do anything else.  To make things simpler, I even eliminated my
CONFIG.SYS file, so things like buffers got their default value.  I, too,
suffered from the "Out of environment space" message.  The wierd thing is
that once I got my prompt I was able to set environment variables until the
cows came home, with *no* errors reported.  My theory is that the code that
deals with environment *thinks* something is resident (other than command.com),
but isn't.  Of course this happens only when executing the autoexec.bat, not
interactively.  Oh, and did I mention that if the last "set" in my autoexec
doesn't end with a CRLF, it gets put in the environment OK, and when it *does*
end in a CRLF I get the error message (Out of environment space), and it gets
truncated?

Sigh...  Does *anyone* know what's going on?
-- 

				    -Eric Feigenson

				    Usenet: {seismo, allegra, ihnp4}!uwvax!ericf
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