Date: Mon, 19 Oct 92 09:19:10 CDT
From: "George Jetson" <pynq AT midway DOT uchicago DOT edu>
To: kuku AT acds DOT physik DOT rwth-aachen DOT de
Subject: Re:  system()
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu


>When I do a system("c:\\command.com") from within a small application it is
>no problem to switch to command level very quickly, but when I'm doing this
>out of my 10 MB application it takes often 20 to 30 secs until the command
>prompt (or bad command or filename) appears.

>Does go32 swap out the exectuable from memory to disk when executing the
>system() call?

Yes.  It does.  This is to maximize the amount of memory available to
the shell'd process.

BTW, I picked up a copy of XLISP21D.ZIP from Simtel the other day (well,
actually, I copied it from my Simtel CDROM, but you get the picture...).
This is a version of XLISP compiled with DJGPP (about version 1.05 from
what I can tell).  The port was done by Tom Almy, et al.

What is interesting about this is that they put together a version of
GO32 that uses Ralf Brown's SPAWNO package, so that the memory overhead
of a DOS shell-out is (virtually) 0.  Wouldn't it be a great idea to
apply these changes to the current mainline version of GO32?