Subject: Stand-alone or from IDE 58. ***** Q: Is a program running stand-alone or from within the IDE? A: Not all questions have an answer yet. I posed this question to the the late UseNet newsgroup comp.lang.pascal, but we have not found an answer that would be general for all MS-DOS versions. The closest we have comes from dmurdoch@mast.queensu.ca Duncan Murdoch (naturally :-). I have done some slight editing of Duncan's solution. uses Dos; type Pchar = ^Char; function Asciiz2Str (p : Pchar) : string; var result : string; len : byte; begin len := 0; while (p^ <> #0) and (len < 255) do begin inc(len); result[len] := p^; inc(longint(p)); end; result[0] := chr(len); Asciiz2Str := result; end; {} var parentSeg : ^word; p : pchar; begin if swap(DosVersion) < $0400 then writeln ('Requires Dos 4.0+') else begin parentSeg := ptr (prefixSeg, $16); p := ptr (ParentSeg^-1, 8); writeln ('I was launched by ', Asciiz2Str(p)); end; end. Another suggestion has been that the contents of ParamStr(0) would show the launching program. I tested this on several configurations and TP versions and found no evidence that the contention would hold. --------------------------------------------------------------------