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

  >                                [...] although MUTEX is a
  > little smarter and reads the name of the program out of the
  > environment (OS2_SHELL) rather than assuming CMD.EXE.

 JdBP>   Interesting, that.  Everyone else (most MAKE utilities,
 JdBP> and most   programs that allow you to "shell out") uses
 JdBP> COMSPEC.  Even CMD uses   COMSPEC, to determine what shell
 JdBP> to start for the START and DETACH   commands when an
 JdBP> internal command or batch file is specified. 

 JdBP>   The only people that I've encountered that use OS2_SHELL
 JdBP> are Borland,   and now you.

 JdBP>   Are you pleased to be in such exalted company ?  (-:

I really never thought about it.  I developed MUTEX so long ago that it
antedates OS/2 Warp, and is actually a 16-bit program, althouh I have
modified it by adding a few command line switches as recently as a year
ago.  I seem to recall that COMSPEC was the DOS flavor and OS2_SHELL was
the OS/2 flavor.  It never occurred to me to revisit the question.
 
-- Mike


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