Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!hal!ncoast!allbery From: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: Unix-like global expansion in DOS Message-ID: <13086@ncoast.UUCP> Date: 13 Nov 88 18:06:10 GMT References: <215@lcuxa.UUCP> <76192@sun.uucp> <1554@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh Lines: 32 As quoted from <1554@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> by sullivan@marge.math.binghamton.edu (fred sullivan): +--------------- | In article <76192@sun.uucp> naughton@sun.com (Patrick J. Naughton) writes: | | >This is a small matter of programming and I would certainly have already | >done it if it were not for the point of this posting: The DOS command | >line (last time I checked) had an upper limit of 128 characters. Thus | >any wildcard expansion which expanded out to more than 128 characters | >would fail. | | A similar problem exists for the Atari ST, and one solution? which has been | used (I think by Mark Williams C) is to pass arguments which go past 128 bytes | in an environment variable. The problem with any solution like this is, of | course, that it simply will not work with existing software. For software +--------------- Perhaps someone should consider an extension to DOS (TOS). Compliant command interpreters would place as much of the argument list as possible in the command line and *also* place the full command list into another memory segment or etc. which would be passed to the program. The extended segment could be 1024 bytes or etc. Programs which aren't compliant would continue to have problems, but compliant programs could use the parameter segment to get the full argument list. If enough programs used the extension, it would eventually become a standard. ++Brandon -- Brandon S. Allbery, comp.sources.misc moderator and one admin of ncoast PA UN*X uunet!hal.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery ncoast!allbery@hal.cwru.edu allberyb@skybridge.sdi.cwru.edu allbery@uunet.uu.net comp.sources.misc is moving off ncoast -- please do NOT send submissions direct Send comp.sources.misc submissions to comp-sources-misc@.