Hi All, Last night I did something dumb that breaks FreeCOM. …Again.
I already created a bug report for this at https://github.com/FDOS/freecom/issues/105 I just wanted to share it here as well. So, I noticed an issue with the new VVIEW utility and wanted to generate a very large and simple text file for some testing. So, I made a relatively simple batch that was going to be used to create it. It was to echo a 64-bit hex value, a space, a 235 byte string and a CRLF over and over again. The Hex value and String being stored in an environment variable. Silly me, those environment variables expand to far more characters than the standard 125 character line limit in batch files. So, I don’t know what I was thinking. Running that batch, I should have expected all of those “Commanline longer than 125 characters.” error messages. But, that was not the surprise. After it output about 23 of those messages, it threw an “out of memory error.” and returned to the command line. The shell would no longer execute any more commands. It would only keep giving “out of memory error.” messages. Requiring a restart. Interestingly changing the character string to 230 characters or less, the batch merrily goes about echoing that data without issue. At 231+ characters, the issue pops up. Initially, the batch was using a combination of VSTR and VMATH along with SET /E to create the string and generate a fixed number of lines. The issue would occur even when the echo line was REM’d out and it just looped. The issue is not with VSTR or VMATH. The have been used for years by the FreeDOS installer to perform this kind of thing. But to eliminate any possibility of some strange interaction between those tools and FreeCOM, I created a different batch to remove them from the equation. For that, I created a text file containing 231 characters and made a dummy hex number. Used the type command to load the text file into the environment using "set /p". Then just repeatedly output the two environment strings using echo. This also brought down FreeCOM. Anyhow, more details and screen shots are provided in the bug report. Happy bug hunting. :-) Jerome _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
