Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bu-cs!madd
From: madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: (none)
Message-ID: <36367@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 12 Aug 89 22:31:05 GMT
References: <4676@brains.UUCP>
Reply-To: madd@buit4.bu.edu (Jim Frost)
Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Organization: Boston University Distributed Systems Group
Lines: 21

In article <4676@brains.UUCP> john_peach%brains@iisat.UUCP writes:
|does anyone know how get ms-dos let you enter a string varable into a batch
|file for the purpose of password protection on boot up or is there an easier
|way?

So far as I know, there's no way.  About the best you can do in a
batch file is to run a small program to get the password and compare
it to something then return an exit for the batch file to deal with.
This isn't very effective, though, since you can ^C before
AUTOEXEC.BAT starts reading and interrupt it.

One of the better methods I saw was a driver (PASSWORD.SYS or
something like that for CONFIG.SYS) that asked before COMMAND.COM even
started.  That worked pretty well.  For a multiuser system I worked
on, I wrote a login command which was run via SHELL= in CONFIG.SYS.
This worked pretty well for our purposes but did tend to eat up a bit
of memory.

jim frost
software tool & die
madd@std.com