From:	"John M. Aldrich" <fighteer AT cs DOT com>
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: odd CWSDPMI.EXE problem...
Date:	Sat, 04 Jan 1997 12:02:49 -0800
Organization:	Two pounds of chaos and a pinch of salt
Lines:	47
Message-ID:	<32CEB769.7FC9@cs.com>
References:	<01bbfa47$e3ef6680$23f377ce AT megaweapon>
Reply-To:	fighteer AT cs DOT com
NNTP-Posting-Host:	ppp102.cs.com
Mime-Version:	1.0
To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway:	from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp

Brian M. Berry wrote:
> 
> A:\> myfile.exe
> OMPT=: cannot open
> 
> A:\>
> 
> The system is an average P5-120.  For grins, I booted the same floppy
> on an older Dell 486/20.  On that machine, the program executed perfectly.
> 
> Anyone seen this before?  Any ideas?  Thanks, and take care!

This is because of a bug (believe it or not) in COMMAND.COM.  When
MS-DOS boots on a machine that has no CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT, it
creates a PATH variable with a null value.  To see this, type "set" from
the DOS command line - you should see something like this:

PATH=
PROMPT=$p$g

It is that "PATH=" that confuses the DJGPP startup code.

The strange thing is that the startup code for DJGPP v2.01 was supposed
to work around this bug in DOS.  Are you sure that you recompiled all
your programs with v2.01?  If not, then any program that was compiled
with the old v2.00 stub will still have the incorrect behavior.  If the
problem persists, please send us a directory listing for your copy of
STUBIFY.EXE with the size and datestamp.

One other reason why you might be getting the wrong stub is using the
'strip' utility on executable files.  It was recently determined that
the current version of 'strip' was compiled with the old v2.00 stub and
replaces the stub in any program it strips with the old one.  There are
several workarounds if this is in fact the case.

What I don't understand is why the program worked on your 486/20.  Does
it have a different DOS version?

Good luck!

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