Date: Fri, 4 Mar 94 13:18:29 JST
From: Stephen Turnbull <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>
To: ghgreene AT nyx10 DOT cs DOT du DOT edu
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: 4DOS (I like it, shelling to 4DOS, where to get it)

I would like to add my vote of confidence in 4DOS.  It is drop-in for
COMMAND.COM, with tweaking its much more efficient, and it supports
lots of features like aliases, user-definable executable extensions,
and so on (see the earlier mail).  I have been using it for 3 years
now, and the only general problem I had was that it munged Japanese-
language screen output on builtin commands like LIST and DIR until the
most recent version.  (Most of you probably don't use Japanese, so ths
shouldn't matter....)
    There is a potential problem as a drop-in replacement for
COMMAND.COM.  That is that, althought there are no problems with spawn
type functions in general, some programs (eg, DEmacs) have hard-coded
the shell to be COMMAND.COM.  The 4DOS docs note this and advise that
you keep COMMAND.COM around in the root directory where such programs
can almost always find it.  (This is in fact not entirely true for
DEmacs: if you know how to set up your _emacs file correctly it can
then find 4DOS.  But if you're not an Emacs wizard *or* don't read
*all* of the DEmacs-specific docs *very* carefully, it might as well
be hard-coded since you need to use Emacs LISP to fix it.)  I forget
how to do it; I use DESQview so I do very little shelling from DEmacs.
    4DOS is available as *shareware* (US$69, I think) from all your
favorite SIMTEL mirrors (oak.oakland.edu; wuarchive seems to have lost
their MS-DOS mirror?).  There are also compatible versions for OS/2
and Windows NT.  You can order directly from JP Software, POB 1470, E.
Arlington, MA 02174 USA (800) 368-8777, (617) 646-3975, fax 617
(646)-0904.
    Check it out!
    --Steve