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From:	Rugxulo <rugxulo AT gmail DOT com>
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: System()
Date:	Sat, 5 May 2012 20:10:52 -0700 (PDT)
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Hi,

On May 5, 9:52 am, Georg <dos DOT  DOT  DOT  AT googlemail DOT com> wrote:
>
> I wonder if it would be possible to write something like Norton/Volkov/
> Midnight commander in djgpp.

There may have been a really old port of it, but I never found or used
it. Though you can instead try Ytree (has DJGPP support), but IIRC
even it doesn't fully work (reading archives fails due to fork()
failure):

http://www.han.de/~werner/ytree.html

> When I select an executable file on the screen I would like to execute
> that. However, e.g. system("command.com") will take quite a chunk of
> the available memory in real mode.

I believe you can just do system(""); and it will work. (Not sure if
you're shelling out yet another shell unnecessarily or not.) Assuming
you're using an XMS_Swap variant of FreeCOM and EMM386 and LH CWSDPMI,
it shouldn't be too much used. But you could also try using "HDPMI32 -
r" instead. I don't know which is leaner, and perhaps CWSDPMI uses
more low RAM due to page tables. BTW, you could also used "stubedit"
to shrink your transfer buffer to save a few kb.

> What could be done to execute the selected program with as much memory
> as possible? And return to the commander when this program terminates?

Dunno. I think most shells and file managers have a very very
tiny .ASM stub file that runs the main program, exits that when
something external is run, and somehow jumps back to the tiny .ASM
starter. See Doszip sources (not DJGPP-based, though) if you're
curious:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/doszip/

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