(as it appeared in PCWORLD April 1992 p.279 by P.B.Mohandas)

A BETTER THAN ONE-A-DAY SOLUTION

These days, AUTOEXEC.BAT files are often loaded with programs to
run disk checks, virus checks, and all sorts of other checks when 
their computers are switched on.  Some people find this annoying, 
especially when they're rebooting in the middle of the day.  To 
keep from being annoyed more than once a day, I wrote a program in
BASIC called DT.BAS that ensures my PC will do these routine
checks only once a day....
    
    1) Copy DT.BAS to the root directory of your boot disk. (e.g., c:\)
    2) Create BOOTONCE.BAT to store the commands to be run once a day.
    3) Remove these same commands from your AUTOEXEC.BAT
    4) Add these lines to the end of your AUTOEXEC.BAT file:

       BASICA C:\DT
       COPY C:\DT C:\TODAY
       DEL C:\DT
       
       (if you're running DOS 5, use         
             QBASIC /RUN C:\DT 
        instead of the BASICA... line above)

Every time your PC is turned on, the program compares the current date to  
the date in a file called TODAY.  If the date has changed, i.e., if 
AUTOEXEC.BAT has not run today, the program will run another batch file,
BOOTONCE.BAT (where you store the commands to be run once a day). 
DT.BAS won't run properly if it can't find BOOTONCE.BAT.  When BOOTONCE.BAT 
and DT.BAS are finished, AUTOEXEC.BAT updates the TODAY file to make sure
the batch will run only once.


          -- I hope you find it helpful!

                                            Tom Molina (for M.P.)