From:	George Foot <mert0407 AT sable DOT ox DOT ac DOT uk>
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: Some comments and questions
Date:	1 Nov 1997 11:44:28 GMT
Organization:	Oxford University, England
Lines:	52
Message-ID:	<63f4ms$ojt$1@news.ox.ac.uk>
References:	<199711010554 DOT SAA29051 AT atlantis DOT actrix DOT gen DOT nz>
NNTP-Posting-Host:	sable.ox.ac.uk
To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway:	from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp

On Sat, 1 Nov 1997 05:54:50 GMT in comp.os.msdos.djgpp Kris Heidenstrom <kheidens AT actrix DOT gen DOT nz> wrote:

: But, info seems to do some weird things.  Here is what I have tried:

: If there is no 'man' program, then I get the symptoms that I described
: earlier - the message 'Bad command or file name' is displayed, then the
: machine appears to hang (but can be broken with Ctrl-C) for 15 seconds
: (this is on a Pentium 75), then starts up with a beep, with the message
: 'there is no menu item no_such_subject in this node'.

: So the question is, why was it hanging for 15 seconds.
[snip various OS tests]

<hunch> 

When info displays a node, does it do so veeeeerrrry slowly, say at
about two lines per second, from the top of the screen down? If so, I
have had a similar problem in a different context. It was OS-dependent
again; results varied across Win95, DOS 7 and DOS 6.22. If not,
forgive the intrusion...

</hunch>

: Info appears to create the temporary file and invoke the command
: interpreter with this inappropriate option, only if it doesn't
: find the 'man' command itself.  If 'man' is present in djgpp/bin,
: info invokes man directly (changing COMSPEC to my dumper program
: doesn't have any effect).

I believe this is perfectly normal operation of the system() function;
Eli can explain better though. It looks for internal COMMAND.COM
commands first, like `cd', then emulates those (without calling
command.com); if the command is not internal, it tries to find an
executable; if it still hasn't got it, it passes the entire line to
the shell. I guess this means it omits the /c switch, as you
described.


Incidentally, long ago I created a batch file called `man.bat' in my
path, which says:

@info libc a %1

I hadn't intended for this to be called from info; it was just a
shortcut to the function index, but info does correctly use this
program to call itself again, retrieve the definition, and display
it. Of course, downloading a real man port would be a better solution...

-- 
Regards,

george DOT foot AT merton DOT oxford DOT ac DOT uk

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