command.com

[John Ruschmeyer]

Forgive the cross-posting, but I've seen a similar question from a PCjr
user ont comp.sys.ibm.pc and hopefully this will answer both.

In article <159 at ole.UUCP> yanagida at ole.UUCP writes:
>       I have  two problems  with  command.com on  my ATT  6300  running
>       MS-DOS v2.11.
>
>       First, I want to have command.com  load from my C: drive  instead
>       of A:.  I have tried putting the line:
>
>       SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM /E:512 /P
>
>       in my config.sys file.  I also put the line:
>
>       SET COMSPEC=C:\COMMAND.COM
>
>       in my autoexec.bat file.   However, all that  does is give me  an
>       error message "Command search directory not found", or  something
>       like that, when I reboot.

Yes, it appears you are missing a parameter to the SHELL= line in
config.sys. You need to add C:\ to the line to tell command.com where to
look when it needs to reload tiself from disk.

In your case, the chrrect line from config.sys should be:

	SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM C:\ /P

or even

	SHELL=A:\COMMAND.COM C:\ /P

since you are booting from A:. BTW, Is C: a hard disk or a ramdisk? It
would seem to me that if it were a ramdisk, you couldn't set the SHELL in
config.sys since there wouldn't be a copy of command.com in C:\ yet. On the
other hand, it C: is an HD, why boot from A:?

Note on COMSPEC under MS-DOS 2.x-
 
There is a bug in DOS 2.x which often clobbers the COMSPEC variable. This
will cause DOS to ask for a valid command.com in drive A:, even though you
have set COMSPEC=C:\COMMAND.COM in your autoexec.bat.
 
PC Tech Journal (and others) have developed programs to get around this
problem. Try checking local BBS's for a program called (I think) COMFIX.

>       Second, I would really like to increase my environment space so I
>       can set a reasonable PATH variable.  Has anyone else  tried this?

Yes, but if you're running 2.11, you can't do it the way you are trying to.
The /E parameter to command.com was not added until DOS 3.1. For DOS 2.x,
you need to patch command.com (sorry I don't have the address handy) or use
one of the programs which dynamically expands the environment size.
(Someone posted a program named ENVSIZE.COM a few months back.)

Hopefully, this is of some help.

-- 
Name:		John Ruschmeyer
US Mail:	Monmouth College, W. Long Branch, NJ 07764
Phone:		(201) 571-3557
UUCP:		...!vax135!petsd!moncol!john	...!princeton!moncol!john
						   ...!pesnta!moncol!john

	This isn't a coronation- this is bad comedy.
						-Galvatron