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Path: utzoo!watmath!watnot!watdcsu!broehl
From: broehl@watdcsu.UUCP (Bernie Roehl)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Re: HELP: How to increase ENV space?
Message-ID: <1890@watdcsu.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 17-Nov-85 18:34:20 EST
Article-I.D.: watdcsu.1890
Posted: Sun Nov 17 18:34:20 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 18-Nov-85 07:33:09 EST
References: <215@ur-tut.UUCP> <1869@watdcsu.UUCP> <399@uwvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: broehl@watdcsu.UUCP (Bernie Roehl)
Distribution: net
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 23

>> 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.
>> 				
>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...  I, too, suffered from the "Out of environment
>space" message...
>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..
>Sigh...  Does *anyone* know what's going on?

I *think* I do.  It seems that DOS will increase the environment space beyond
128 bytes *only* when there is nothing loaded above the resident portion of
command.com; when a batch file is executing, the batch file gets loaded right
after the end of command.com, so the increase doesn't happen.  Thus, to increase
the environment space, you have to actually type the SET commands at the
keyboard (yuck!).  Maybe the patch is the way to go after all...