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From: jallen@netxcom.UUCP (John Allen)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Re: switchar
Message-ID: <145@netxcom.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 27-Oct-86 11:10:23 EST
Article-I.D.: netxcom.145
Posted: Mon Oct 27 11:10:23 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 27-Oct-86 22:30:57 EST
References: <1402@uw-june>
Reply-To: jallen@netxcom.UUCP (John Allen)
Organization: NetExpress Communications Inc. Vienna, Va.
Lines: 25

In article <1402@uw-june> roper@uw-june.UUCP writes:
>What is "switchar"?  I have stumbled across a couple of cryptic
>references to it and my curiosity is piqued.  From what I was
>able to infer, it seems to be an environment variable in DOS that
>can be set to change the character used as a separator in pathnames.
>I tried it several ways but couldn't get it to work (DOS 3.2).
>I would like to be able to use the '/' character in any event.

There is an undocumented DOS function (sorry, I don't have it at hand)
which allows the switch character to be read or set.  The switch character,
as the name implies, is used to delineate command line switches.  The
default character is '/' under DOS.  I like to use '-' instead, since
I'm likely to type that without thinking about it.  Every DOS command,
Microsoft C, and many others seem to use the undocumented call to read
the switch character, or atleast accept the '-' that I like to use.

When the switch character is something other than a slash, Unix-like
path names may be used in almost all circumstances.

John Allen
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