Topic : User Manual for TeraDesk Author : Wout Klaren, Henk Robbers, Djordje Vukovic Version : February 2017 Subject : Documentation/Utilities Nodes : 87 Index Size : 2746 HCP-Version : 3 Compiled on : Atari @charset : atarist @lang : en @default : Main @help : @options : -i -t4 +z @width : 75 View Ref-FileContentsSupported Protocols 10.1 The ARGV Protocol TeraDesk In GEMDOS the length of a command line is limited to 125 characters. The ARGV protocol makes much longer command lines possible. This is done by passing the parameters through the ARGV environment variable. A disadvantage of the protocol is that many programs do not support such long command lines and may even crash. For this reason TeraDesk enables you to switch the protocol on and off in Set applications... and Set program types... There are two ways you can avoid this difficulty with the ARGV protocol: 1. Install programs which do not support the ARGV separately using the 'Set program types...' menu item. Enter their full names in the list of file types and switch off the ARGV protocol for them. Make sure you enter their names nearer to the top of the programtypes list than any other name masks which they might match. 2. Do the inverse of 1: Switch off the ARGV protocol for all programs but enter the names of those that do separately. Yet another possibility is to install them as applications with the ARGV protocol switched off. For program files which are not installed as applications, but for which the ARGV flag is set (i.e. it is set for the respective program type), this protocol is used only if the command line is longer than 125 characters. Otherwise, the default command-passing mechanism of the operating system is used. Note that different AESes do not behave identically regarding the ARGV protocol, and the passing of command lines generally, because of slightly different behaviour of the shel_write() function in those AESes. Problems may be encountered when passing parameters (e.g. file names) which contain spaces or quote characters, or when passing both the parameters and a local environment. The functionality of the ARGV protocol in Tera Desktop can be modified by specifying the flag 'A' in the environment variable TERAENV, such as: TERAENV=A which will force Tera Desktop to bypass the ARGV-composing mechanism in shel_write() and to build a local environment string with the ARGV variable appended whenever starting a program which understands ARGV, regardless of the length of the command line. This may help if problems are encountered.