Date: Fri, 15 Apr 94 16:52:56 EDT
From: peprbv AT cfa0 DOT harvard DOT edu (Bob Babcock)
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: shelling to DOS
Reply-To: babcock AT cfa DOT harvard DOT edu

A couple weeks ago, I raised the question of whether a program could tell
whether a shell-to-dos would overflow the swap disk.  I received a few
suggestions, but haven't yet had time to follow up.  But in addition to the
swap overflow problem, there's also the problem that paging everything out
takes a fair amount of time.  I was wondering whether it would be possible to
stuff a small program into real-mode memory which loads command.com and
sneaks into a dos shell behind go32's back using _go32_dpmi_simulate_fcall().
Is there anything obviously wrong with this idea?  The one thing that comes
to mind is that go32 reprograms the interrupt controllers; I don't understand
that part of go32 at all.  (But then, there's lots of go32 I don't
understand.)  I know this problem is supposed to go away with version 2.0,
but I don't know what time scale to expect for release of 2.0.