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From: Fabrizio Gennari <fabrizio DOT ge AT tiscalinet DOT noitspam>
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Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: CMDXSWP.COM missing from list of DOS shells
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Date: Fri, 02 Apr 2004 22:11:25 GMT
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To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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FreeDOS distributes a shell called CMDXSWP.COM, which is a DOS-style 
shell. i.e. requires the /c switch when launching commands. 
Unfortunately, it is not present in the list of DOS-style shells present 
  in the file libc/dos/process/dosexec.c, variable shell_brokets. Since 
FreeDOS by default sets the COMSPEC env variable to point to this, it 
may cause problems: for example, the system() function invokes the shell 
without /c, causing the invocation to fail.

Example: take this somple program

int main(){
	system("echo Hello World!");
	return 0;
}

, compile it with DJGPP, and run it on a FreeDOS system with FreeDOS 
installed, no SHELL variable and the variable COMSPEC pointing to 
CMDXSWP.COM . It fails, because system(), detecting that echo is not an 
executable file, tries to launch the shell, passing "echo Hello World!" 
as the parameter. Unfortunately, it does that without the /c switch.

The fix would be to include CMDXSWP.COM in dosexec.c. A workaround is to 
  set the SHELL variable to COMMAND.COM, which is correctly detected by 
DJGPP as being a DOS-style shell.