Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 23:32:38 +0100 To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu From: Anton Helm Subject: A go32 story ... I know that go32 is going to die soon, but I want to inform you about a strange behavior we discovered last week. We are working on a large project (a compiler) that is split into several executables. All of them are compiled with DJGPP and go32.exe is linked to all of them (with coff2exe -s ...). Most of the executables are called with spawn() commands by a "shell" program. During one run of the "shell" more than 100 spawn() might be used (depends on data). The different executables interchange data by temporary files. The program was running here on my PC without any problems. My FILES in config.sys were set to 30. Then we transferred the executables to another PC and when running the program there with the same data we got the following: One of the spawn()-ed program suddenly stopped with an error message saying that it couldn't open a file (the filename and the actual position of the error message varied with different data). The error message came from my error handling routines and indicated that an fopen() returned NULL. We had to set FILES to 255 to run the program without error messages. I could fill in here several paragraphs about what we tried to solve the problem, but it would be boring and I skip it. Here is the surprising result: When we put a separate copy of go32.exe into a directory which was in the PATH (note that go32 was already in the executables) everything worked fine (with FILES set to 30). Conclusion: If you give your DJGPP compiled program to someone else there might be circumstances which require to supply an extra copy of go32 even if you have "linked" go32 into your executables. If someone could give an explanation (or even a good guess) what's going on here I invite her/him to send comments to this mailing-list/newsgroup or my private mail address (see below). That's all for now, I'm going home to get some sleep. Tony *************************************************************************** Dipl.-Ing. Anton HELM * mailto:tony AT nt DOT tuwien DOT ac DOT at Institut fuer Nachrichtentechnik * http://dictator.nt.tuwien.ac.at/~tony/ und Hochfrequenztechnik * http://www.tuwien.ac.at/nthft/ Guszhausstr. 25/389 * phoneto:+43-1-58801-3520 A-1040 Wien, AUSTRIA * faxto:+43-1-5870583 ***************************************************************************