Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!madd
From: madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Shell command question
Message-ID: <23499@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 25 Jun 88 19:10:13 GMT
References: <1102@cod.NOSC.MIL> <1018@sun.soe.clarkson.edu> <1988Jun17.110045.27448@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu>
Reply-To: madd@bu-it.bu.edu (Jim Frost)
Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Organization: Boston University Distributed Systems Group
Lines: 23

In article <1988Jun17.110045.27448@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu> ansari@gpu.utcs.UUCP (Aali Ansari) writes:
|	is there a way to give the path to autoexec.bat  instead of keeping
|	in root ?

I can answer this from experience:  No.  The best I could do in
providing a login function with differing login scripts was to chdir
into their directory, run command /c autoexec.bat, and have the
autoexec.bat file run another command.com.  "exit" drops out of both
of them.

This is really obnoxious, but MS-DOS is really, really centered around
the one user per cpu deal.  Our system is a network (centralized
server) and we wanted to allow user logins at any terminal.  How?
shell=\login.exe in the config file.  The login program did the above.
It all works pretty cleanly but it's not a pretty way of doing it.
The bonus is that the user can be given different shells by merely
changing the autoexec.bat command.com invocation to something else
(like csh :-).  This works really nice in making "turnkey" logins; the
secretary need only type her name and password to invoke the
wordprocessor.

jim frost
madd@bu-it.bu.edu