Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!husc6!ogccse!blake!evan
From: evan@blake.acs.washington.edu (Not Evan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: environment sizes
Message-ID: <506@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Date: 7 Jan 89 23:48:45 GMT
References: <34216@bbn.COM>
Reply-To: evan@blake.acs.washington.edu (Not Evan)
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 55

In article <34216@bbn.COM> grossman@bbn.com (Martin Grossman) writes:
>
>I need the following:
>
>	1) correct syntax of shell= line in PCDOS 3.1 (config.sys)

    The syntax is
	shell = [d:][path\]shellname.ext [/P]
    where the /P switch tells IBMDOS (?) to make the shell ram-resident.
    If you are using COMMAND.COM and omit the /P switch, a portion of
    COMMAND.COM is split off and loaded into the highest part of RAM, but
    without any protection from user programs, so that a program that uses
    all of RAM will wipe this portion out, causing DOS to re-load it from
    disk after the program exits.  For this reason, it's called the 
    transient portion of COMMAND.COM.  It amounts to at most a moment's
    delay on a hard-disk system, but can be annoying if you have only
    a floppy drive.

>	2) correct syntax of shell= line in PCDOS 3.3 (config.sys)

    The syntax here is
        shell = [d:][path\]shellname.exe [/P] [/E:xxx]
    where /P is as for 3.1 and /E allows you to specify the size of the
    environment space (!!), in bytes.  xxx can range from 768 (which I think 
    is the minimum, and default) to a whopping 32,267.  On my own system,
    I have config.sys set
	shell = c:\usr\dos\command.com /P /E:1024

>	3) correct byte(s) to modify environment size in PCDOS 3.1's
>	   command.com

    Don't know.

>	4) save as #3 above except command.com in PCDOS 3.3
 
    Moot, since this can be set on the fly in config.sys.

Hope this helps.

--erw;

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