Thanks for the response. And I can appreciate the curiosity as to why the use of variables

1. the use of variables is due to the application running on both unix and windows platforms and using the same source to configure the application environment. It works quite well and centralizes the maintenance of a large number of clients in a hybrid os, global environment.

2. the information that you've supplied I've also seen...however, I have also seen on the microsoft site the following...

  • The maximum individual environment variable size is 8192bytes.
  • The maximum total environment variable size for all variables, which includes variable names and the equal sign, is 65,536KB.

    http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/default.asp?url=/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/ntcmds_shelloverview.asp

    This is the source of my confusion

    In reply to Re^2: environment limitations by joinersw
    in thread environment limitations by joinersw

    Title:
    Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
    and:  <code> code here </code>
    to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.