This request has no direct relevance to any game, but it might be useful for configuration files. I don't expect the developers to waste time on it, but I hope a user who is more expert than I am might be interested in the question.

I would like to be able to perform this action, perhaps in a batch file that is called by the [autoexec] section of a .conf file: find the 8.3 DOS short name of a file that is present on an already-mounted drive, and put that short name into a variable, so it can be used by an application running inside DOSBox.

So, if there were a "setsfn" command that did this, it might work like this. For example, if my "My Documents" folder on the host system is mapped to drive X:, I would then give this command:

setsfn myvar "c:\documents and settings\roscoe\my documents\My Long FileName Document.extension"

The result would be that the variable %myvar% would contain something like this: X:\MYLONG~1.EXT

Is this theoretically possible in DOSBox?