Subject: Re: shell mode limitations

From: David Goldschmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 1996 17:31:05 -0400

>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Mitchell <[email-masked]> writes:

    Paul> I'm running emacs-19.34.1 under win95.  Any shell I invoke via M-x
    Paul> shell-mode seems unable to run .bat files or even .exe files.  Most
    Paul> .bat files fail because they run out of environment space, while
    Paul> when I try to compile from within shell-mode the shell process just
    Paul> hangs.  Is anyone actually able to use shell-mode as their main
    Paul> command line interface under win95?  I grew to like this while
    Paul> working on a unix box and I'd like to be able to continue to use it
    Paul> under win95.

I fixed the environment problem by putting the following line in my
config.sys:

shell = c:\command.com /p /e:1000

I think the /e:xxxx sets the space for environment strings to xxxx bytes.
I've had limited success with running M-x shell.  I can run the djgpp
port of gcc (I guess I actually ran this with M-x compile, come to think
of it), I can run dir and simple stuff, but my typed commands are echoed,
even after I put a line in my .emacs suggested in the FAQ which was supposed
to fix this.  But when I tried to run a program of mine which runs for a long
time and outputs to the console frequently I didn't get any output and
finally killed it (BTW this wasn't easy).  I'm not sure if it bombed or if
there's some sort of buffering problem.

David Goldschmidt