From: George Foot 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 Precedence: bulk On Sat, 1 Nov 1997 05:54:50 GMT in comp.os.msdos.djgpp Kris Heidenstrom 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] 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... : 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