Date: Sat, 15 Feb 1997 16:22:57 -0600 (CST) From: "Colin W. Glenn" To: "'OpenDOS newsgroup'" Subject: Re: [opendos] BAD Filesystems In-Reply-To: <14795.9702152115@pulteney.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net Precedence: bulk On Sat, 15 Feb 1997 dg AT dcs DOT st-and DOT ac DOT uk wrote: > >> > I believe that COMMAND.COM / 4DOS allready allow you to do what > There's a limit in DOS of 128 characters for the command line, after all > environment variables have been expanded (this is the PATH limitation > problem). I think this is because there's a fixed-size buffer. While it > I don't know how easy it would be to make the buffer longer --- how many You'd kill every app with this, the reason for the limit is that the command line is placed in the Program Segment Prefix, the first 256 memory locations of every program. The first 128 are control related information, the second 128 is the Default Data Transfer Area, and is also used to hold the command line until you use the DTA. Which is why it's important to read the command line before doing any disk activity unless you setup your own DTA. BTW, there's a flaw with the 128 characters, the first character is a count of the length of the command line, the second is the space character from the command line, and the rest is the actual command line itself and as far as I can remember, there's a NULL character at the end. So effectively you have 126 characters available. A Christian Web Site! The Light .
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