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From: mjp@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Michael Portuesi)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: 1.2R PATH question
Message-ID: <1115@spice.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Thu, 8-Jan-87 17:59:27 EST
Article-I.D.: spice.1115
Posted: Thu Jan  8 17:59:27 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 8-Jan-87 23:43:39 EST
Reply-To: mjp@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Michael Portuesi)
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 64

Keywords:


I've had some time to get acquainted with the 1.2 Enhancer, and all
around I really like it.  A lot of the "rough edges" I disliked in 1.1
are gone, including the ugly icons, the ram: driver running out of
memory and crashing the system (now it tells me it's full), system
requestors automatically bringing the workbench screen to the front,
etc.  But the one command I was looking forward to so much, PATH, is
not behaving the way I expect it to.

Since I only have one disk drive, I spend lots of time swapping disks
in and out to load programs and data files.  I put the programs I use
90% of the time on my Workbench disk, in a directory called
newcommands (following a suggestion I picked up in the manual).  My
startup-sequence currently looks like the following:

addbuffers df0: 25
path add sys:newcommands sys:system sys:utilities sys:c
echo " "
prompt "Ok, Mike %N> "
echo "moving common commands to ram:..."
makedir ram:c
copy c:copy ram:c
assign c: ram:c
;
; lots of commands to copy files to ram:c go here...
;
run popcli

What I want to do is set up a search path such that, if I have some
random disk in the drive and I type the name of a command or a program
that resides on the Workbench disk, the machine will pop up a
requestor saying "Insert Disk Workbench 1.2 in any drive".  Then it
will load the command and program and I can go about my business.

Right now, when I attempt this feat, the CLI barks something like
"Unknown command foobie.bletch".  When the Workbench disk is in the
drive, however, it searches the directories on the path and finds
anything I can type.

If this system worked, I could have my cake and eat it too.  When I
type the name of an oft-used command, the system retrieves it from
ram:c.  When I type the name of a an obscure command, the system would
automatically request me to insert the disk, then load and execute it.

Also, I regularly use MicroEmacs 3.7 (until I can get my hands on
microGNU 1.0).  From what I can tell, it searches the current
directory and c: for the init file.  When I run Emacs from the
top-level directory with the .emacsrc file in newcommands, Emacs
doesn't find it.  Newcommands is on the search path.  Why isn't it
found?

Is it my expectations that are too high or does the PATH command do
more than the manual leads me to believe?

-- 

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| Mike Portuesi / Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Department     |
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