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