vg55611@ihuxy.ATT.COM (Gopal) (10/18/88)
To all programmers: If you could write an extra couple of lines to substitute all "/" by "\" in paths, that would help out the SWITCHAR issue a lot. Venu P. Gopal att!ihuxy!vg55611 vg55611@ihuxy.att.com
davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr) (10/20/88)
Several observations on switchar: bird@kksys.UUCP (Mike Bird) writes: #Another friend of mine used to work for a company (now defunct) who was a #licensed MicroSoft OEM. He still had the OEM book from MS. In it, there is #documented a MSDOS function x'37' subfunction 01. I created a TP4.0 program #to use this function, and it worked identically to the switchar program. #Identically in every respect. Same problems. So, I conclude that the #problems are in the products I'm using, and not in the programs which #switch. Here are some examples of the problems I'm having: Yes, and in DOS2.x there was a config.sys option called "switchar=*" where * was anything you wanted to use. If * was not / you could use it for path delimiters. and then vg55611@ihuxy.ATT.COM (Gopal) writes: #To all programmers: # #If you could write an extra couple of lines to substitute all "/" by #"\" in paths, that would help out the SWITCHAR issue a lot. It's not needed. All you have to do is to avoid actually rejecting the '/', since DOS accepts either as a path delimiter. This is documented in the section on DOS call interrupts, page D-14 in the manual I have handy, #6936752, "Note: All calls that accept path names will accept a forward slash or a backslash as a path separation character." This is why C compiler (at least MSC) accept / in includes, because they would have to take special trouble to not accept it. Some programs have the / programmed in, and parse the command line themselves. Others let command.com parse the command line and changing the switchar works fine. No effort is needed to allow / in names, just the care to not break something which works the way you would like by default. Hope this clarifies the problem as being in the programs and not (for a change) in DOS. -- bill davidsen (wedu@ge-crd.arpa) {uunet | philabs}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me