Hi! Richard,

In a message to Ben Ritchey you wrote:

 RW> On Mon 2039-Apr-04 02:49, BEN RITCHEY (1:393/68) wrote to RICHARD
 RW> WEBB:

 | RW>> if exist NODELIST.%BASEXTEN% goto yes

 BR>> Maybe the leading zero is being truncated? or the BASEXTEN
 BR>> variable already has a leading dot? Looks fine otherwise 
 BR>> {shrug}

 RW> NOpe, just won't let you look at file.ext and look at .ext
 RW> when indicated by an env var.  Noticed this a couple times
 RW> over the years and found some sorta kludgy workarounds to
 RW> it, but thought I might be missing something.

About the only thing you're missing is _not_ running MS-DOS 7.x-something. 
:)  You really need to pick up an old copy of Win95 or Win98; I'm sure if you
then just delete or rename Win.Com then the GUI just cannot start.  You'd
probably get the side-benefit of having a NetBIOS client with access to a
network (I used to do similar but using a different method, years ago).  In
any case, DOS 7.xx even allows for line-by-line evaluation of batch statements
including percent variables at a command-line; you'd be limited somewhat by
not having the GUI to cut & paste from however.

In separating the elements of a filename I use Horst's NSET, like this...

-----8<-----C-U-T--H-E-R-E----->8-----
  :: What's the name of the newest net segment file, then?
  DIR /O-D/B/S %DOWNLOAD%\%SEG_BASE%.*|NSET /L1 SEGMFILE=$0
  :: What's the net segment's filename extension?
  DIR %SEGMFILE% /B|NSET /S. SEGM_NUM=$2

  :: Now stick it where MakeNL can pick it up from...
  LOGECHO + $D-$N-$C$Y $h:$m:$s  Moving %SEG_BASE%.%SEGM_NUM% to the updates
dir!  >>%UTILSLOG%
  MOVE /Y %DOWNLOAD%\%SEG_BASE%.%SEGM_NUM% %WORK_DIR%\updates
-----8<-----C-U-T--H-E-R-E----->8-----

Although it's called every day that one exectutes a minimum of once a week. 
It looks for net segment submissions from NCs within my region (#54).

Yesterday I ran a test with my alias file (FREQ list) generator batch in a
MS-DOS 6.22 VirtualBox using a virtual 16meg HDD for data, which uses NSET and
a similar technique for splitting-out the bits of filenames, and it ran though
the lot in near record time: 40 seconds.  It surprised the pants off me.  ;-)

Maybe if you do an ECHO or three instead of the GOTOs you might actually see
what's going on?  Also, perhaps try using NSET instead of that other
util.[shrug]

Cheers,
Paul.

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