Hello,
            first post in this forum: although i h' learn't a little bit of DOS and making bat files (still practicing/using in Virtual BOX): and its not too hard finding Tutorial's for BAT and DOS cmds.
           
    But i just wanted some pointers from experienced DOS Users a sure and quick method to learn making BAT and DOS cmds ( i know only a fraction of DOS cmd's ) i really want to learn to use the switches/parameters that are necessary for making BAT files.  Its would be a great help.
     
This command will transfer the batch file to the users startup folder where %username% is a username variable that the batch file will work out and all you have to do is change "file-name.bat to the name of your batch file

copy "file-name.bat" "%systemdrive%\users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup"or

Code: [Select]
copy %0.bat "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup"


Which will actually work if the users profile folder is on another drive such as a second partition or a drive as well as in a networked environment where the profile folder is often mapped to a network drive.

Either way, it seems completely irrelevant to what the original post was requesting.


Floppyman: Personally, my first forays into batch were with MS-DOS 3.21 and a RELATIVELY ancient book "running MS-DOS" which thankfully was "updated and revised to include the new MS-DOS 3.21!". I've later learned there are versions of the book for DOS 5 and 6 as well by the same author- revisions, I imagine.

After that, it was simply building upon what I already knew- shortly after I was able to get a copy of DOS 6, and I learned about the various new command switches; for example, dir, in DOS 3.21, only had the /w switch, so it was quite a lesson to learn how to sort a directory listing based on filename- iirc something like "dir | sort /+16" which sorted starting at the 16-th COLUMN; but after they added the various /o (sorting) switches to DOS it became essentially a built-in feature. These new features were well documented in a small help program that DOS installed in C:\DOS- "help.exe" (or maybe it was help.com) whatever it was, it was a early text-based hypertext document that listed all the various commands and their syntax as well as config.sys commands (rather redundant today). Nowadays, as you noted, there are a lot of sites that are dedicated to documenting various batch tricks and tips. It still better to look through the actual /? help for each command though.  OK BC_Programmer: i guess their is no shortcut to it.
             PRACTICE and more practice is the only thing to get more acquainted with DOS and Batch.  It will take quite some time: