Mail Archives: opendos/1997/02/15/17:48:32
On Sat, 15 Feb 1997 dg AT dcs DOT st-and DOT ac DOT uk wrote:
> >> > I believe that COMMAND.COM / 4DOS allready allow you to do what
> There's a limit in DOS of 128 characters for the command line, after all
> environment variables have been expanded (this is the PATH limitation
> problem). I think this is because there's a fixed-size buffer. While it
> I don't know how easy it would be to make the buffer longer --- how many
You'd kill every app with this, the reason for the limit is that the
command line is placed in the Program Segment Prefix, the first 256
memory locations of every program. The first 128 are control related
information, the second 128 is the Default Data Transfer Area, and is also
used to hold the command line until you use the DTA. Which is why it's
important to read the command line before doing any disk activity unless
you setup your own DTA. BTW, there's a flaw with the 128 characters, the
first character is a count of the length of the command line, the second
is the space character from the command line, and the rest is the actual
command line itself and as far as I can remember, there's a NULL character
at the end. So effectively you have 126 characters available.
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