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From: davidr@hplsla.HP.COM (      David Reed)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: switchar
Message-ID: <2690001@hplsla.HP.COM>
Date: Mon, 1-Dec-86 17:54:45 EST
Article-I.D.: hplsla.2690001
Posted: Mon Dec  1 17:54:45 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 8-Dec-86 05:10:49 EST
References: <1402@uw-june>>
Organization: HP Lake Stevens
Lines: 17

My understanding (and experience):

SWITCHAR  is  indeed  used  to  modify  DOS so as to be  able  to use  another
character instead of the backslash as directory separator, allowing the use of
an alternate  character to preceed  parameters.   For example, since I use the
unix system alot, I have used SWITCHAR  specifying the slash as path separator
and thereby had the hyphen recognized by DOS for parameter options, as in:
                         DIR C:/UTIL/*.COM -P

My copy of SWITCHAR was created by me on my system from typing in what I found
in a magazine.  I remember  there was a comment that the program was utilizing
an  undocumented  DOS  function.  The program  works on my computer with MSDOS
2.11, but will not work with the  computer  I have  running  MSDOS  3.1, and I
suspected  (without doing any checking) that the  undocumeted  function was no
longer available.

-David M. Reed      hplsla!davidr