naga@wet.UUCP (Peter Davidson) (09/10/90)
A couple of people kindly sent me email saying that SET LIB=\C\LIB;\C\OTHERLIB works just fine for them and DOS does not treat the semicolon as a command separator. This surprised me greatly, since I "discovered" long ago that DIR;DIR would produce two directory listings. So I rebooted with a minimal AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS and (Oh! Amazing!) DIR;DIR no longer worked. Turns out that the semicolon effect was due to the presence of Bryan Higgins' HISTORY utility. I have long used this utility to allow me to recover previously entered commands by using the up-arrow (as in dBASE), and greatly recommend it. I now take it for granted so much that I forgot it was there, and in any case erred in attributing the semicolon effect to DOS rather than to HISTORY. Apologies to the net!