markz@microsoft.UUCP (Mark Zbikowski) (06/27/84)
"... PC Tech Journal Sept/Oct 1983 pg 138 says it's an offset to a word requiring relocation in the load module..." The PC tech journal is omitting a very important item that is incorrectly described in appendix H of the IBM 2.0 DOS manual. Page H-2 of the manual lists the contents of the word at offset 18h to be the offset of the first relocation item within the file. This is what the linker emits to point to the relocation table. The EXEC system call uses this to look for the table. Unfortunately, on page H-3, the first paragraph leads one to believe that the relocation table will *always* begin immediately after the header. This is incorrect; the pointer to the relocation table was used so that the EXE file header may be extended as additional functionality is needed. I believe that the PC Tech journal writer was mislead by this paragraph.