Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1993 13:23:10 +0100
From: sperber AT soir DOT informatik DOT uni-tuebingen DOT de (Michael Sperber)
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Programmers' editor


Stephen Turbull writes:
>I don't see what you're complaining about; I never managed to get
>DEmacs to run a directory listing without crashing :-)  Did you have to
>do anything special to get M-X compile to work? 
...
>    In general, DEmacs's ability to shell to DOS or run subprocesses
>sucks.  But it looks to me like you've just got a compiler that's too
>big for its britches here.

Just for the record: I use Demacs's shell & compile facilities all the
time, and I only run out of memory when I accidentally exit from
Demacs, start ANOTHER one, and then escape from there.  Generally,  if
you have a shell that swaps itself out on executing (e.g. 4DOS or
MS_SH2.0) and a make that does likewise (like GNUish make), things
should work pretty well.  Assuming you've got 512K of memory, a
resident Demacs takes about 100K of that, the subshell would take <4K
which should leave 400K - enough for most well-behaved applications.

The only glitch:  You have to make sure a shell subprocess returns
with exit code 0.  That's easy with 4DOS (just write "exit 0" into
4EXIT.BTM) and not possible with MS_SH.  However, you can always add
...;exit 0 to command lines.

Cheers :-> Chipsy