> 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.


Ah, you're looking for the equivalent (+more) for the Windows 'Start in...'
property.

I didn't there was one, maybe...  I'm not sure I actually have any of my old
DOS manuals, moving house tends to do that.

The only thing I can think of is to change the directory while the program
is running.  Maybe you can play tricks with the SUBST command.  If the
program opens "DATA.DAT" without the path, then you shell out and ChDir, the
next time it opens "DATA.DAT" it'll look in the current (new) directory.

I'd say that's what Windows 'Start In' does anyway.

Or run the program from the new directory.  That is, more to the data
directory run the .exe from there.  Depends how the .exe opens the data file
though.

Otherwise you'll need to create your own environment variable, so 'SET
DATAPATH=C:\fred\data\' and fiddle with that.

I've never heard of a way to have the operating system search for data
files, as per PATH.  As you say, dangerous.  PATH is bad enough at times!

Tony

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