COMMANDS ON BOOTUP
by Dick Pilz, DKA, July 1987

(Using COPY to create an initial command line.)

I use many short cuts in my day-to-day operations of programs. 
The first thing that I do is to have my program disk boot up and
run in the particular manner that I desire.  There is a program
on your systems disk called COPY.COM or something similar that
allows you to specify a "CCP Command Line."

A "CCP Command Line" is actually something that you are already
familiar with.  When you type at the A> prompt on your screen,
you are typing a CCP Command Line.  An example would be "MENU"
for Perfect Writer, "Filer B:" for Perfect Filer, or "WS" for
WordStar.  The COPY program has a method for you to write this
command onto the system track of your program disk so that when
you start the machine and put in your disk, or press "RESET" with
your disk already in, it will have the same effect as if you had
typed that command.

When you run COPY, have the program disk that you want the
command to live on placed in drive B.  There are several menu
choices that can do the job, but usually the best one is (on my
particular program) "O" for OTHER, then "S" for SYSGEN OR WRITE
SYSTEM IMAGE.  The program will warn you that it is about to
write on the system track of the disk in drive B.  When it asks
for you to enter an initial command line or press RETURN, instead
of the vanilla route, enter the program command that you want the
disk to start out in.

For example, on my utility disk I have the command "SWEEP B:",
which has the utility program SWEEP loaded in and switched to
look at disk B.  My applications program disks are loaded in a
similar manner, with the sometime addition of the required data
drive.  Perfect Writer has "MENU"; Perfect Filer has "FILER B"
(the database is on drive B);  Turbo Pascal has "TURBO"; and
dBase II has "DBASE".

Whenever I start my machine or press RESET, the main program is
automatically loaded into memory.  Now, there is only one button
to push, which makes running the program in the future difficult
to forget.  It's a lot faster, too.
