What problems did APPEND in DOS solve?

[charnitz]

For those of you who used DOS back in the day, what problems was the APPEND command used to solve?

I (think) I understand what it does and have tested it to see I can access a file from another directory without specifying its path once I have APPEND loaded with its path, but I am trying to understand what scenarios made it useful enough to write a dedicated TSR program for it, entailing both the writing of the program and the resident memory usage. Did it originate from something that predated DOS, like CP/M?

 

[jafir]

My guess would be for programs that were from before directories existed, like written for dos 1.0, and cannot handle a file with a path on the command line. But that’s just a guess. Evidence that it’s NOT the right guess would be that it took until DOS 3.something to show up... way after it would have become an issue.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Think of APPEND as sort of a symbolic link. You have files in several directories, but are using a command that operates in the currently logged directory. You'd like to access them all without explicitly specifying or changing paths.

Append can do this.

 

[bakemono]

One scenario that comes to mind is that you might have some application you're trying to run which expects to have all of its files in one place, but you can't fit them all on the same disk.

 

[Chuck(G)]

With the proviso that all of the APPENDed files appear only in the currently logged directory. You can even APPEND files from other partitions--back when the maximum size of a partition was 32 MB, this could solve a real problem.

 

[dieymir]

It's usefull in these cases:

* Old programs ported from cp/m that do not support directories, i.e. Wordstar and dBASE II Imagine yo have several database files on different directories, you need to have dBASE copies on each of those dirs. or use APPEND (actually the problem started with DOS 2.0 but there wasn't an "official" solution till MS-DOS 3.2 or PC/MS DOS 3.3 but there were some unofficial ones including one from IBM itself).

* You have a dual floppy system (no hard drive) and your program does not fit on one floppy so you APPEND B: drive and problem solved.