Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi
From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Unix-like global expansion in DOS
Keywords: MS-DOS commandline length
Message-ID: <4603@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Date: 4 Nov 88 18:37:25 GMT
References: <215@lcuxa.UUCP> <76192@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 34

In article <76192@sun.uucp> naughton@sun.com (Patrick J. Naughton) writes:
>The DOS command
>line (last time I checked) had an upper limit of 128 characters....
>Does anyone know if this is hardwired, or where the hack
>would have to go in to change it?
...
>This shortcoming of DOS/COMMAND.COM causes standard Unix Makefiles to be
>useless since most link lines get to be several hundred characters,...

The command line limit is unfortunately hard-coded because of the
limited size of the PSP.  (I think this problem is inherited from
CP/M.)  For C programs, that use argv[], this is not a problem at all
-- the C runtime library can still expand command line arguments and
malloc() space for them, and in fact both Microsoft and Borland
supply functions that will do this for you and call main() with
argv[] containing expanded filenames.  (It's true that various
versions of these have various peculiarities, often choking on forward
slashes in pathnames.)

This command line shortcoming is not a problem with makefiles if you use
Don Kneller's ndmake program.  It accepts highly UNIX-compatible
makefiles, and recognizes the word "link" and feeds the linker a
response file with the @ command.  It's shareware for $35, and a steal
at that price.

(P.S.  They just fixed my PS/2 and gave it back to me, and I'm using it
for the first time and finding the placement of the keys quite
irritating.  Does anybody have a simple way of exchanging the caps-lock
and ctrl keys on the keyboard?  I wish these big companies such as DEC,
AT&T, and IBM would stop trying to improve keyboards by constantly
changing the keys around, inserting backslashes at odd places, making
escape keys vanish, etc.)
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi