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.WINDOWS_USE.: Problem - Out Of Environment Space
.ALIAS.......: environment_space
.DISCUSSION..:
There are two problems that people commonly report when attempting to run Fdate under Windows NT. One is that they run out of environment space. The other is that the /V parm does not work, and Fdate's output is not be put into an environment variable


"OUT OF ENVIRONMENT SPACE" UNDER WINNT
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I'm not an NT user (I use Win95), but one can encounter this same problem when running under Win95 (or even Win 3.1), so I will extrapolate from those problems.

This is a problem that may affect any process that runs in a "DOS box" under Windows, and sets an environment variable. It is discussed briefly in the the Fdate documentation (although with the advent of WinNT and Win95, that discussion is a bit dated). The problem is that when Windows launches COMMAND.COM, it allocates to the new process only the amount of environment space that is in use by the current environment. This does not give the launched process any free space that it can use for its own purposes, so when it tries to set an environment variable, you get the "out of environment space" message.

The trick is to tell Windows that when it starts the "DOS box" (COMMAND.COM), it should allocate a certain minimum amount of memory for the environment, regardless of the amount that is currently being used.

How to do it under Win95
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Select the shortcut icon that you use to start MS-DOS. Right-click on it. When the pop-up menu appears, t click on PROPERTIES. When the properties for the shortcut come up, click on the MEMORY tab. When the tab sheet is displayed, set a value for INTITIAL ENVIRONMENT. I usually set it to 2048 (that is, 2K) bytes. This will ensure that when DOS (COMMAND.COM) is started, 2K bytes are allocated to the environment.

How to do it under WinNT
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I'm not an NT user, so I don't know how to do this under NT, but I'm betting the process is similar. Try doing what I've described for Win95. Let me know how it works out. If you find that the process is different under NT than it is under Win95, it would be really helpful if you could e-mail me a description of the process that worked for you. Then I could forward it to anyone else who might ask me about the same problem in the future.