Hi Roy,
Lets see if everything made it here........;-)
 PK> You can apply many of the standard DOS strategies to OS/2 (EG 
 PK> with renaming .BAT files to .CMD and they work very much the 
 PK> same, however at times this can bite you when you are not looking. 
 RJT> Oh?
Silly things, such as the way some S/W still thinks only in short filename 
terms, even when using HPFS. Lets say you have 2 files -
  SHORT.NAM
  LONGERFILE.NAM
Under FAT the 1st one is valid, the second is not. FAT sees the 2 parts of 
the name as FILENAME and EXTENSION. Provided all your files fit the 8.3 
format, then there is no problem. However, it can get interesting on HPFS 
when BOTH names are valid, however the name is the entire filename with a 
period in it, not as a 'FILENAME' + 'EXTENSION'. This works fine for both 
filenames, however some apps still choke on more than 8 letters before the 
period. In some cases you can work around this by enclosing the entire 
path\filename within quotes, and then the app is happy, but this does not 
always work. I spent 4 days chasing one of these situations, because the base 
Part was 9 letters and did not really look any different because a variable 
font was used and the letter I takes up very little room with them......;-)
 PK> The other issue is running parallel applications as 
 PK> 'background' processses. With careful thought this can work 
 PK> quite well, but you have to get used to working in parallel 
 PK> mode...
 RJT> I do that now with dos/dv.  I'm sitting here in my 
 RJT> editor,  the bbs is up, and mail processing gets 
 RJT> handled as a separate process too.
Good, thats the way it should be. I take it you syncronise the mail 
processing somehow? OS/2 applies standard file sharing across all apps, so 
you have to take care when trying to get multiple tasks to access to the one 
file in a non-shareable manner. Squish & Maximus can handle this itself 
nicely for the message areas (area reading, tossing and packing in seperate 
sessions), but there are some applications that get a bit upset. I have just 
1 task that controls the mail import/processing/export tasks, that way no 
clash of resource ever happens.
Sounds like you are well on the way to at least understanding what you will 
run into........pk.
--- Maximus/2 3.01
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Next conference: FIDO Message Area
Next topic: 252 OS2 DOS

FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 252 OS2 DOS       Ref: D5K00000 Date: 05/12/96
From: JOHN LINDSAY                                          Time: 09:36pm
\/To: ALL                                                 (Read 7 times)
Subj: error message

Greetings all
I use Describe as my wordprocessor. it gives me the following error message. 
Perhaps someone with greater insite than mine into the workings of OS2 Warp. 
I get the infamous SYS3175 with access violation at 1bf91c56
DOSCALL1.DLL 0002:00001c56. This happens constantly. I have an updated 
doscall1.dll but cannot rename,remove or overwrite the original doscall1.dll. 
I do not know if this is the cause or does some program have access to this 
.dll and is causing a problem. I have also tried removing describe, only to 
have it fail to de-install because a file called dwpxxx.dll is in use by 
another program. Again, cant find out what program is using this file. I have 
win3.11 wfwg, and os2 on seperate partitions. I open up one dos program upon 
startup. I have tried no dos programs , closing most applications but still 
get these errors. can anyone shed some light on why, how do I cure it etc.
Thanks
John Lindsay
--- Maximus/2 2.02
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