SYSNEWS - a login information screen utility for Windows

Who said Windows programs were large and complicated? This readme is considerably larger than the program source file.

The genesis of this program was that I was getting crapped off with having sign-on information screens on the LAN being called up from the System Login script. I could never either put them up or get rid of them when I wanted to, as there was usually a workstation somewhere sitting at the login prompt, preventing me from being able to modify the System login script.

SYSNEWS is designed to be placed on the RUN= line of WIN.INI in a network environment. If it finds the text file SYSNEWS.TXT in any of the directories listed below, it loads it into Notepad for the workstation user to read. If it doesn't find the file it exits. I wrote it to also accept the text file name as a command line parameter, but it doesn't appear that you can put a command line parameter on a program that is executed on the RUN= line. Windows just interprets the parameter as another program and doesn't pass it to the first program. You could get around this by placing the program instead in everyone's startup group with the correct file name parameter - or you could take the 30 seconds it needs to modify and recompile it. If you specify a full pathname to the default file in the program code, you must use double backslashes. e.g.

	"Z:\\PUBLIC\\SYSNEWS.TXT"

If the file name parameter specifies a filename and extension only, the program searches for a matching file in the following directories (in this order): 

1 The current directory. 

2 The Windows directory (the directory containing WIN.COM.

3 The Windows system directory (the directory containing such system files as GDI.EXE). 

4 The directory containing the executable file for the current task. 

5 The directories listed in the PATH environment variable. 

6 The list of directories mapped in a network. 

Nick Payne
CIS 100033,3030
18 Jan 1993