Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!mcgill-vision!quiche!calvin!rossp
From: rossp@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (Ross PORTER)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.programmer
Subject: Re: How do I make my path bigger?
Message-ID: <2429@calvin.cs.mcgill.ca>
Date: 10 Mar 90 18:58:43 GMT
References: <1941@v7fs1.UUCP>
Reply-To: rossp@calvin.cs.mcgill.ca (Ross PORTER)
Organization: SOCS, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Lines: 38

In article <1941@v7fs1.UUCP> sv@v7fs1.UUCP (Steve Verity) writes:
>
>I want to have a path that is almost 150 characters long.  Unfortunately,
>DOS truncates the path I specify in my autoexec, if it gets too long.
>
>There must be a work around, no?
>
>

Yes, Steve, there is a work-around.

The problem is that DOS only allows 128 chars on the commmand line.
The solution is to abbreviate individual paths so that a large number
can fit in 128 chars.  Suppose, for brevity's sake, that you want to
include only two individual paths in the PATH environment variable:

subst f: c:\program\dos
subst g: c:\program\win386

path=f:;g:;

You have to tell DOS to allocate space for these "device handles" (f,g),
by including lastdrive=[letter] e.g.  

lastdrive=z

in config.sys.  Note that 26 (a-z) drive handles is all you get.

This is something of a bastardization of the SUBST command.
IBM/Microsoft introduced SUBST with hard drives.  It was designed to
fool older applications that were not hard disk aware.  So, if your copy
of PeachTree G/L looked for data on drive B:, DOS could fool it into
looking in a particular directory on the hard drive instead:    

subst b: c:\data\peach

Ross Porter
rossp@calvin.cs.mcgill.ca