Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!tness7!killer!egs
From: egs@killer.UUCP (Eric Schnoebelen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: MSC coded replacement for COMMAND.COM
Summary: DOS 3.x will load .exe's as shells
Keywords: Turnkey application, what must I initialize? what must be trapped?
Message-ID: <4343@killer.UUCP>
Date: 4 Jun 88 04:52:53 GMT
References: <1284@adec23.UUCP> <559@wsccs.UUCP> <110@otishq.UUCP>
Reply-To: egs@killer.UUCP (Eric Schnoebelen)
Distribution: na
Organization: Organization, what Organization?
Lines: 18


A while back I wrote a replacement shell for our Systems.  I found that MS/PC-
DOS 3.1 and above would load a .EXE as a shell ( ie. the loader / relocator is
actually in the OS where it belongs ).  Other things to be wary of:
DOS does not pass a valid enviroment pointer to the shell program.  You Must 
allocate your own environment.  You Must also replace the critical error 
Handler.  Other than that ( if I remember correctly ) you can do anything you 
want.  I wrote mine in turboC, and it came out to be about 30K.  It was a menu
driven front end to tie all of our applications together.

	Eric Schnoebelen
	John W. Bridge & Associates, Inc
	killer!u-word!egs

( by the way, I bought a copy of the MS-DOS encyl. during this adventure, and
found it to be almost no help.. for this problem )

#include