[alt.msdos.programmer] Long command lines

bright@Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) (08/23/90)

I've been looking at ways that a parent program can spawn a child program
with command lines that are > 127 bytes long (the max for DOS and OS/2
(why didn't OS/2 fix this?)). The most obvious approach is to pass the
long line via an environment variable.

I've heard that some MAKE programs do this.

What name do they use for the environment variable? Is there any sort
of defacto standard for this? What if both the environment variable
and a command line exist, does the environment variable come 'before'
or 'after' the command line?

If there is no commonly used environment variable, how about defining one,
I propose "CMDLINE".

(Interestingly, MSC6 CL passes long command lines to the compiler passes
C1 with the environment variable "_MSC_CMD_FLAGS".)