re questions about dos external join command in article srg c i spud hyperion com the author writes i am setting up my dos unix box on a m ide and a m scsi drive and was wondering about the use of the ms dos join command i like the way it sets things up since i won t have to stick with the c d e crap that dos enforces i like how it would mimic mount points of unix filesystems i have heard that there were problems with using it or at least under older versions of dos please tell i have been using the join command for many years now mostly with good success in duplicating unix style file mounts you will hear lots of people cursing join because they confuse it with the dos append command a truely gnarly hack but don t believe them you also will hear people saying that microsoft recommends that you not use join but in microsoft s windows workgroups resource toolkit the following appears join an ms dos utility works fine with windows for workgroups if you do not change the state of the joined drives during a windows for workgroups session this includes adding or removing joined drives from within windows for workgroups we recommend that you do not use join when running windows setup or windows for workgroups within this caveat join appears to be valid under windows however i have found a couple of applications that don t deal well with filesystems that have been mounted using join in particular the worst offender is word for windows x it gets very confused when you edit and then try to save a file on a joined drive it wants to create the saved file as nnnnn tmp in the current dir then delete the old file and rename the nnnnn tmp file to the doc file unfortunately wfw usually writes the nnnnn tmp file in some idiotic place other than the current directory often in the root dir of the joined filesystem but not always then after deleting the original doc file it can t find the nnnnn tmp file to rename it unless you search your disk systems the document is gone i have also found subtle problems using the mks toolkit from a dos box when joined filesystems are present i used to join c temp with a meg ramdisk but mks sometimes gets confused when doing an ls on the c temp dir and misses some files in the temp dir this is difficult to reproduce but it goes away totally when join is not used i think this is a windows problem rather than mks s since it works ok under raw dos so i would suggest that you can use join but be aware that it may not be as robust you would like wouldn t it be real great to mount network drives i e z under the main file tree rather than having all those darned drive letters unfortunately join won t let you do it there was talk on the net about a simple patch to let join work on network drives but i don t remember the source it s too bad the join command is not better implemented since it would avoid using all those stupid drive letters i realize that messdos was meant for casual even ignorant users so mounting all the drives in one file tree might be confusing but it looks like ms is going to carry this over into windows nt another os meant for casual even igorant users not with all it s old family system baggage maybe ms needs a recovery group so they can get on with life jerome jerry schneider domain jls atg com aspen technology group uucp uunet csn atglab jls po box ft collins co voice
