Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!cec2!news
From: jcb2647@cec1.wustl.edu (James Christopher Beard)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: How can I set a PATH longer than 128 bytes ?
Keywords: path environment
Message-ID: <1990Mar9.042437.8981@cec1.wustl.edu>
Date: 9 Mar 90 04:24:37 GMT
References: <5762@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM> <17140003@hplred.HP.COM> <1990Mar8.021622.13121@cec1.wustl.edu> <1684@maytag.waterloo.edu>
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Reply-To: jcb2647@cec1.wustl.edu (James Christopher Beard)
Organization: Washington University, St. Louis MO
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In article <1684@maytag.waterloo.edu> dmurdoch@watstat.waterloo.edu 
(Duncan Murdoch) quotes from my followup:

>>. . . you can shorten the
>>number of characters in the path by giving some of the directories
>>"aliases" using the SUBST command a la 
>>
>>	SUBST E: C:\PROGRAMS\JOE\WORDPROC\WP
>>
>>Then you can include the virtual drive E: in your path.  Two notes,
>>though: 1) SUBST mustn't be used in a networked environment, which
>>seems like the place you're most likely to need it, and 2) for the
>>above to work, you need a command of the form "LASTDRIVE=E" in
>>CONFIG.SYS, where you replace "E" with the name of the
>>highest-lettered drive or virtual drive you will ever want to refer
>>to.

and then asks:

>Just out of interest:  what goes wrong in a networked environment?  I've
>been running for years (non-networked) with 
>  SUBST E: C:\
>in my autoexec; it makes it easy to maintain two views of the same disk,
>since I can CD independently on C: and E:.  What's going to go wrong
>if I ever hook up to a network?

I don't know why Microsoft says not to use SUBST when hooked to a
network.  My caveat comes simply from the MS-DOS manual.  I suspect
that it has to do with potential wrangling between SUBST and the network
software over who gets to apply what alias to what directory where,
but a real answer will have to come from someone else.