This section describes how MHonArc determines which operating system is being
used and what limitations exist for the given operating system.
MHonArc will automatically detect which operating system it is running under. If
the following list of conditions are true, MHonArc assumes it is running under
MS-DOS:
- The
COMSPEC
environment variable is defined.
- The value of the
COMSPEC
environment variable is a legal MS-DOS
pathname.
- The value of the
COMSPEC
environment variable is an executable file.
If any of the above conditions is false, MHonArc assumes it is running under Unix.
- NOTE
- The previous conditions are used since the conditions will exist if Perl has
been installed on an MS-DOS machine. None of the above conditions exist
when Perl is installed on a Unix system.
No limitations exists when MHonArc is used on a Unix system. The only
constraints that may exist are memory and disk space.
The following descibes the limitations, or changes to default behavior, if running
under MS-DOS:
As under Unix, MHonArc's capacity to process messages under DOS is constrained
only by memory and disk space. It has been tested with over 1000 messages in one
archive. However, this can require a great deal of memory. BigPerl can be
configured to use virtual memory if your real XMS memory is insufficient. BigPerl
also can run under Microsoft Windows 3.1x, using Windows' own virtual memory.
Be aware that MHonArc stores its archive as one file per message plus an
additional two index files. On a hard drive with 8K clusters (256K to 512K
partition), this can consume a great deal of overhead space if your messages are
small. For example, 100 messages averaging 1K in size use 100K to store their data
but take up 800K of disk space. (This may not be true under some disk
compression drivers.)
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MHonArc 1.1.0 -- Operating System Limitations