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From: del@pilchuck.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Desqview environment variables
Message-ID: <598@pilchuck.Data-IO.COM>
Date: Tue, 3-Feb-87 00:25:47 EST
Article-I.D.: pilchuck.598
Posted: Tue Feb  3 00:25:47 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 5-Feb-87 01:45:54 EST
References: <2110@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <1312@sci.UUCP>
Reply-To: del@pilchuck.UUCP (Erik Lindberg)
Organization: Data I/O - FutureNet Corp.; Redmond, WA
Lines: 48

Ok, this is a *workaround* not a solution:

Patch the version of command.com that resides in the DV directory to
have enough environment space to support all the variables you wish to
use. This is the command.com that DV loads, *not* the one in the root
directory, *or* the one specified in COMSPEC (I know, I know, yuck).
Then just put the SET statements in your startup batch file that
you execute when you startup DV. If you absolutely *must* have a copy
of the environment that you had when you fired off DV, write yourself a quick
and dirty little program (in your favorite programmin' language) that will 
insert the characters "set " in front of each line it reads from a file,
and echo to stdout. Have the rest of the commands you execute on startup
in some file which you concatenate to the output of this program. Uh, an
example: you wrote the program called SETSET.COM, and default commands
are in DVSTART.TXT, then you put this in the batch file from which you
invoke DV:

set > tmp.out
setset tmp.out > dvstart.bat
type dvstart.txt >> dvstart.bat
del tmp.out
dv

(of course, if you really know your stuff, you will just write setset to
take the environment variables from it's own env. copy, but this example is
something any beginning BASIC programmer can do)

In your dvstart.txt file you may want to include a set of commands to
add the default DV directory to the search path if it is not already there,
this is what DV does with the path variable when it gives it to your
program. This can be done as follows:

path %path%;C:\DV

in your dvstart.txt file. NOTE that this command *must* execute from
a batch file or it will not work.

Finally, lest I leave out the obvious, in the "command to start program"
field of the Change Program menu for DV, you set the command to "dvstart".

I didn't say  it was a good solution, did I? But it does work, because
this is exactly what I wanted to do at first. After things settled down,
I found I could just put the standard environment variables directly in
the DVSTART.BAT file and skip the other stuff (it does slow down the
opening of a DOS window by an annoying amount).
-- 
del (Erik Lindberg) 
uw-beaver!tikal!pilchuck!del