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> APPEND is one of the things that are completely irrelevant 99.99% of the time… yet can be extremely useful when the need arises. Is it really that irrelevant
by TeMPOraL 2y ago
> APPEND is one of the things that are completely irrelevant 99.99% of the time… yet can be extremely useful when the need arises.
Is it really that irrelevant? I mean, if you look past the specifics (directories, interrupts, DOS versions), this seems to be implementing the idea of bringing something into scope, in particular bringing it into scope from the outside, to modify the behavior of the consumer (here, assembler) without modifying the consumer itself. Today, we'd do the equivalent with `ln -sr ../../inc ../inc`.
I'd argue the general idea remains very important and useful today, though it's definitely not obvious looking back from the future what this was what APPEND was going for.
- theamk 2y agoYes, general idea is still very important and useful, but this is post about specific command called "APPEND" in MS-DOS environment. Also, it's not an equivalent of "ln -sr" as "ln" replaces targets and not stacks them. The proper modern equivalents are environment variables like LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PYTHONPATH, PKG_CONFIG_PATH, etc... and overlayfs mounts for a generic case. But back to the APPEND: in all my time working with MS-DOS, I don't remember ever needing that, so it was 100% irrelevant to me. But this could be because I've worked with more "modern" programs (like Turb Pascal 5) which had good support for directories.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]