You receive an "out of environment space" error.

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The "out of environment space" error can occur when there are many set commands or a long path statement in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file.

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You can change the available environment space by putting the following line in the CONFIG.SYS file:

   shell=c:\command.com /e:<size> /p
				

To set the environment to 256 bytes, use one of the following lines:

   MS-DOS Version          Configuration Command
   ---------------------------------------------
   3.00 or 3.10            shell=command.com /e:16 /p
   3.20 or later           shell=command.com /e:256 /p
				

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The /e:<size> parameter specifies the environment size, where <size> is the size in bytes or in multiples of 16 bytes.

The term "paragraph" is used to refer to these 16 bytes.

For MS-DOS versions 3.0 and 3.1, size is in multiples of 16 bytes that you want to reserve for the MS-DOS environmental variables, ranging from 10 to 62 paragraphs (160 to 992 bytes).

For MS-DOS versions 3.2 and later, the size is the actual number of bytes, ranging from 160 to 32,768 bytes. MS-DOS rounds the specified size up to the next logical paragraph boundary.

For MS-DOS versions 3.2x, 3.3x, 4.0, 4.01, and 4.01a, the default size is 160 bytes.

For MS-DOS version 5.0 and later, the default size is 256 bytes.

NOTE: Attempting to use the /e:<size> parameter without the forward slash (/) results in the following error message at bootup:

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