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EXPAND environment variable
Name: bigfatroundguy Date: December 27, 2005 at 21:34:48 Pacific OS: DOS 7.1 CPU/Ram: Pentium 3 - 384M
Comment:
Does anyone know the effect that the following command has within an Autoexec.bat file: set EXPAND=YES It is typically found on bootdisks and I googled everywhere and found nothing
If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.
M2
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Response Number 2
Name: jboy Date: December 27, 2005 at 22:18:31 Pacific
Reply:
It's on a great many from bootdisk.com & others, but seems absent on those that don't create the temporary RAM drive.
Set it to 'No' and see if there's any difference
If you get people asking the wrong questions, you don't have to worry about the answers
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Response Number 3
Name: WhitPhil Date: December 28, 2005 at 13:17:34 Pacific
Reply:
It is "just" a variable.
It will have no affect on anything UNLESS the batch file makes reference to it.
You will have to look at the file itself to see what it is used for.
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Response Number 4
Name: melee5 Date: December 28, 2005 at 19:23:49 Pacific
Reply:
Another site suggests that it is used primarily for MS-DOS setup/installation disks where self-expanding installation executables use it to either expand for installation or not expand/install depending on the value (or existance?) of that environment variable. I don't have any such disks nor have I ever done that, so it's just a big ol' WAG on my part.
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Response Number 5
Name: bigfatroundguy Date: December 30, 2005 at 21:02:10 Pacific
Reply:
I continue to tinker... I have removed the set EXPAND=YES and it seems to have no impact on my autoexec.bat successfully decompressing (using extract) the ebd.cab file onto a ramdisk (i tried several commands without issue).
If this environment variable served a purpose at one time, it certainly isn't obvious what purpose it serves now.
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