file control block

operating system (FCB) An MS-DOS data structure that

stores information about an open file. The number of FCBs is

configured in CONFIG.SYS with a command

FCBS=x,y

where x (between 1 and 255 inclusive, default 4) specifies the

number of file control blocks to allocate and therefore the

number of files that MS-DOS can have open at one time. y (not

needed from DOS 5.0 onward) specifies the number of files to

be closed automatically if all x are in use.

(1995-03-21)