Rather to my surprise, so far ALL the answers have missed the poont of 
my original question which I THOUGHT I'd made clear, but obviously I 
didn't :-)

I am well aware of the *PROGRAM* path feature which I gave an example 
of.
Everyone referred to that, which I am aware of, and which is not 
useful for solving the problem, alas.

AFAICR there is also a much more rarely used ***DATA*** path feature 
available somewhere in the dark arcanery of the MSDOS world.

As for "what's wrong with using ..." - I have mo idea - but it doesn't 
work :-)
ie the more normal DOS tricks fail.

What I am looking for is what I (thought I) said I was looking for - a 
command that allow sprograms referencing data in what they actually 
think is their "current directory" to be actually accessing it in 1 or 
more directories OTHER THAN the current director .

eg Say the command I want was DATAPATH ....

_______________

DATAPATH C:\FRED

C:
CD  \JIM

DIR ALLAN

______________

would list all files named ALLAN BOTH in C:\JIM and ALSO in C:\FRED

    ie     C:\JIM\ALLAN
&
            C:\FRED\ALLAN

A truly dangerous facility :-)
But, sometime suseful.


        Russell



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