David Muir wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

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

 DM>     If it makes you feel any better, I agree with you. OS/2
 DM> set me up with  OS2_SHELL pointing to CMD.EXE and COMSPEC
 DM> pointing to COMMAND.COM. This leads  me to believe that your
 DM> assumption is correct. That and the fact that a number  of
 DM> OS/2 doors I have, attempt to execute "comspec" which is not
 DM> defined in an  OS/2 session which effectivley results in no
 DM> OS shell available. (Both  variables are in my config.sys).
 DM> It would seem that IBM's intention was to  differentiate the
 DM> two variables for the two platforms.

I checked further, and it does seem that, officially, COMSPEC is supposed
to point to the DOS command processor, not the OS/2 command processor.  My
(OS/2 Warp Connect) system does see the COMSPEC environment variable
defined in an OS/2 session, and it is defined to point to CMD.EXE.  I am
fairly sure that, at some point in the past, I chose OS2_SHELL for a
reason, but I am not entirely sure I now know what it was.
 
-- Mike


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