Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club! >> The result of issuing "path" at command line then appends >> c:\myapps to the list above > No, it rewrites the path variable. The end result is the same, but the > whole line has to be put into the command buffer before the PATH > variable can be rewritten. >> And how long could you make the PATH variable before it went >> wrong? > In MSDOS 7 I found I could enter up to 1023 characters from the > keyboard, or from a batch file, or from env variables, but at > character #1024 it would bomb out and give me the "bad command or > filename" error message. Hi all, Greg is right; at least in DR-DOS all environment variables are expanded to their full content before the command line is interpreted, so the command line limit always applies. However, there is a second limit that nobody on this list seems to be aware of: Since PATH is an environment variable, its length is also limited by the size of the environment space. So if you have set /E:384, then all environment variables together cannot become larger than 384 B. But it is rather interesting to read that MS-DOS 7 uses a much larger command line buffer. I always thought that 128 characters is too short, particularly when running programs that had originally been developed for Unix. Regards, Udo -- The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project - http://www.drdosprojects.de -- This mail was written by a user of The Arachne Browser - http://arachne.cz/ Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --