I do not know how interesting or useful this is for anyone but:
Long ago I used a hex editor or debug to patch my command.com
so that it always gave about 1k of environment space. Simtel has
a file with instructions on what to look for in the binary to do
this. You have to improvise a bit for different versions of command.com
but it is not hard.
There are tricks such as defining variables before you start the shell.
But I often encountered programs that had a command of their own to
shell to dos, so you could not do anything yourself to make sure you
had a large enough environment.
I could life with the little memory loss because of about 1K of space,
and since I did this (maybe 9 years ago) I have never had problems with
environment space, as a result of programs shelling to dos.
I there is enough interest, I can hunt for the program that tells you
how to do this.
