Date: Wed, 29 Jan 1997 00:17:21 -0600 (CST)
From: "Colin W. Glenn" <cwg01 AT gnofn DOT org>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
cc: Gurunandan R Bhat <grbhat AT unigoa DOT ernet DOT in>, djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: tar for DJGPP
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970128130859.11362B-100000@is>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970129000050.14917A-100000@sparkie.gnofn.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Tue, 28 Jan 1997, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Jan 1997, Colin W. Glenn wrote:

<Moved my prior to bottom for reference>

> Not to me, it doesn't.  Why do you need to load cwsdpmi resident, when 
> every DJGPP program loads it on startup automagically?  Why do you need 
> to invoke TAR for each file instead of extracting those which you need?  
> What does ``real mode session'' mean?

In brief:  Real mode session, what the computer starts in.  Currently, I
use XTree as a command shell, it allows me to be wonderfully interactive
with my machine, but it's a real mode program, doesn't use DMPI, doesn't
use EMS/XMS.  It has a wonderfull 'batch commander' built in, you create a
menu, and each menu item contains batch file lines, (or not).  When you
'launch' a command, it creates a batch file to run the command, hence runs
command.com.  Of course all in real mode.  To keep things simple, I have a
very short path, and a use very little environment from my autoexec.  This
give me plenty of play room to add custom set's, and create paths as I
need them, because (of course) this all gets discarded when the command
quits.  So when I use DJGPP, I use two set's to setup DJGPP's environment,
and run the program.

Now that that's out of the way, I'm still learning C, understand most of
the concepts, but still getting a grasp of how the language works.  I
found a wonderfull tutorial on the net, but have better things to do than
learn C on the net.  Besides which, I'd rather read it off paper.  The
creator of this tutor has made available his sources in the form of two
TAR's, great, wonderfull, something to print out!  BAD NEWS, it's *inx
filenames and paths.  Can't unload it to one dir, or even to the tree, DOS
would corrupt the names.  Solution, write QBasic program to get each file
from the archive as it's needed, find out what the resulting DOS name is,
use it, and when finished, delete it.  Hence, multiple DeTar'ing in one
sitting, as I said, up to 160 access's to the TAR.

You know what?  The irony of this just struck me, the program I've written
would be great as a C program, yet I have to get the files out and study
them to learn C!

> > I, myself, noticed that, but didn't use it because I had need of TAR
> > multiple times in a real mode session, ie I was calling it up to 160 time
> > at one sitting to extact a _single_ file for working with.  Even loading
> > cwsdpmi as resident wouldn't help because I'd have to do it before
> > launching my command shell, and I didn't want it in my autoexec because I
> > might not need it.  Is this making sense?

Hmmm, so much for brief:)