Date: Thu, 25 Dec 1997 09:48:33 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Brian Hawley <brian DOT hawley AT bigfoot DOT com>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Determining Operating System
In-Reply-To: <67sb84$kk5$1@news.megsinet.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.971225094813.20294G-100000@is>
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On Thu, 25 Dec 1997, Brian Hawley wrote:

>   PATH C:\Utilities\bin;C:\BIN;%PATH%
> Put the win32 (console) programs in the Utilities\bin directory and
> the dos programs in the BIN directory. The Utilities directory will
> only be visible as such when in Win95 or NT, but the similarly named
> dos programs in BIN will show up in dos mode.

It is unclear to me why do think this should work on all machines.
Are you relying on "Utilities" to have "UTILIT~1" as its the short 8+3
alias?  If so, then this is only true as long as somebody won't set up
their Windows 95 to disable the numeric tails.  When somebody does
that, the short name of "Utilities" will be "UTILITIE", and DOS will
happily find the 32-bit version because it silently truncates long
names.

So I'd say this method is only reliable on Windows NT, not on Windows 95.

> I use this to organize my unix clone command line utilities like du
> and zip, automatically using ones with long filename support when
> appropriate.

On Windows 95, if you use `zip' and `du' compiled with DJGPP (`du' is
from Fileutils, v2gnu/fil316b.zip), you can have a single executable
that automagically supports long names when they are available.