5.0 - DOS/32 Advanced - Environment Variable

By default, the install program will add a line SET DOS32A= followed by the path to the directory into which you installed DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender to your autoexec.bat file. Later on, you can add the options described in the previous section of this manual to this line directly after the path, separated by spaces or slashes(*). However, the intention of this section is to explain why you need this environment variable even when you do not use any options to specify the configuration of the DOS Extender from the environment.

The environment variable DOS32A will be used by DOS/32 Advanced only when you specify any options in it, and the path portion will always be ignored by the DOS Extender. Furthermore, the environment variable is not required to be included into autoexec.bat by the DOS Extender itself, however it will be used by certain DOS/32 Advanced utilites and by DOS/32 Advanced stub files STUB/32A and STUB/32C. The following utility programs will rely on the environment variable DOS32A in order to operate properly:

SB - SUSNYS Bind Utility program will, when binding DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender or DOS/32 Advanced stub files to your applications, look in the specified path, subdirectory .\BINW for DOS/32A, STUB/32A and STUB/32C executables.

SC - SUNSYS Compress Utility program will, when compressing applications look in the specified path, subdirectory .\BINW for SUNSYS Bind Utility program SB.EXE.

SS - SUSNYS Setup Utility program will, when restoring Predefined Configurations look in the specified by the path directory, subdirectory .\D32 for default configurations (*.d32 files).

And finally DOS/32 Advanced stub programs, STUB/32A and STUB/32C will, when bound to your applications, look in the specified by the path directory, subdirectory .\BINW for DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender executable.

Also, when using the programs mentioned above, all of them will search the directories for the required files in the following order:

1) current directory, from which the programs were started (applies to SB, SC, SS, STUB/32A and STUB/32C).

2) default DOS/32 Advanced directory, specified by DOS32A environment variable, subdirectories .\BINW for SB, SC, STUB/32A and STUB/32C, and .\D32 for SS.

3) additionally, STUB/32A and STUB/32C will scan the PATH environment variable in order to find the DOS Extender's executable file dos32a.exe.

(*) Note:
when adding environment variables to the line SET DOS32A= which contains the directory path pointing to DOS/32 Advanced base directory (the directory into which you installed the DOS Extender), the directory path should always stay in front of the environment variable list. No spaces or other characters should be put between the equal sign, and the first letter of the directory name.