Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
From: Elliott Oti <e DOT oti AT stud DOT warande DOT ruu DOT nl>
Subject: Re: .COM's with DJGPP?
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Date: Sun, 19 Apr 1998 21:24:56 GMT
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Vic wrote:
> 
> Weiqi Gao wrote:
> > Oh-oh, intellegent life detected!
> 
> :) he he
> 
> > > renaming the exe to com will NOT crash the computer.
> > > Why don't you try for yourselves? It's THAT easy. It works on my machine
> > > anyways.
> >
> > But why?
> 
> I think the win95 loader scans the file, it no longet looks at the
> extention. I think it looks for the EXE header, and if it doesn't find
> it, it assumes it's a com. Just relying on the extention would be stupid
> (but we ARE talking about microsoft)

Even under plain DOS the extension COM or EXE makes no difference. DOS
checks to see if the magic string "MZ" is present; then it treats the
program as an executable, otherwise it loads it as a COM file ( 1
segment, code + data must be less than 64K  -- tiny model for old Turbo
C users).
BTW 4dos.com, ndos.com and some other similar command interpreters are
actually EXE's in disguise :-)

Cheers,
-- 
------------ Elliott Oti ---------------
   ------------- http://www.fys.ruu.nl/~oti  ---------