Jonathan de Boyne Pollard wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

 JdBP>   COMSPEC is *officially* supposed to point to "the command
 JdBP> processor". 

Sure, that's useful.  :-)

 JdBP>   Since the environment variables in VDMs and in native OS/2
 JdBP> are distinct,   this gives us a COMSPEC in VDMs that points
 JdBP> to COMMAND, and a COMSPEC in   native OS/2 that points to
 JdBP> CMD.

 JdBP>   And this is, in fact, what we find.

No, it isn't.  Several people have confirmed for me that COMSPEC sometimes
points to COMMAND.COM, even from OS/2 sessions under 2.11.  I don't know if
this was a bug or what, but the behavior was only standardized under Warp. 
The situation as it stands is that, if you want reliable performance under
versions prior to Warp, you have to use OS2_SHELL.
 
-- Mike


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