Mail Archives: opendos/1997/02/08/17:15:30
On Mon, 3 Feb 1997, Andrew McLachlan wrote:
> On Sun, 02 Feb 1997 "Colin W. Glenn" <cwg01 AT gnofn DOT org> wrote:
> > On Sun, 2 Feb 1997 jdashiel AT eagle1 DOT eaglenet DOT com wrote:
> > As far as I can remember, command.com has to be a com file because it's
> > resident portion contains EXEC, and that has the exe relocator.
> Hmmm. I don't know anything about that, but would mention that
> 4DOS.COM is an .exe file with a .com extension.
Hmmm, did a little reading up and found something interesting, it seems I
was remembering some oddities about the DOS's, IBM set up their
command.com to contain EXEC because of space problems with their SYS
files. Which means that certain versions of IBM DOS _will not_ be able to
handle 4dos.com because the relocator isn't loaded with the SYS. As far
as 4dos.com being an exe, that _doesn't_ matter, the loader looks for the
'MZ' signature, if found, it's a EXE, no? com. Try this:
DIR *.EXE >TEMP.BAT
(then edit temp bat so it contains lines like this:
rename thisfile.com thisfile.exe
(save this BAT, you'll need it later.)
rename *.EXE *.COM
(if this fails, you'll have to use a BAT file to do the renaming)
Now all the programs will still run, from withing shell programs, the
command line, and I think even windows will run them, (never tried that),
because like I'll say, the extension only plays a role in FINDING the
file, not in determining what type of executable it is.
After you've finished playing, run the BAT to restore the extensions.
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