This menu ability is a feature of MS-DOS 6.00 and above including MS-DOS 7.xx
the one that comes with Windows 9x. It allows you to run different commands,
and therefore configure your machine differently, depending on what
options you choose. This is all well and good but how is it achieved?
Well you need to change at least your CONFIG.SYS file and probably also
your AUTOEXEC.BAT file.
The first thing to do is to include "[MENU]" in your CONFIG.SYS file.
Now comes a unlikely scenario which is needed to show how this works.
Basically you have two people using the same machine (Fred and Sid?),
anyway the one likes to have the country set up for the UK whereas the other
prefers to be set up to use US information. I'm now going to show
how a menu is set up for this situation.
You obviously need two items on this menu, I'm going to
call these "United Kingdom Configuration" and "United States Configuration".
These options must now be added to CONFIG.SYS (after "[MENU]"), the
CONFIG.SYS file will now look like this:
[MENU]
Menuitem=UK,United Kingdom Configuration
Menuitem=US,United States Configuration
The "Menuitem=" adds a menu item.
"UK" and "US" are the blocknames we'll come to these
later. The "United Kingdom Configuration" and "United States Configuration"
will actually be printed on screen, you could use whatever you wanted to more
or less.
Now of course when the UK option is chosen you need to execute
"Country=044" and for the US option "Country=001" how is this done? Simple
add the following to CONFIG.SYS:
[UK]
Country=044
[US]
Country=001
Note that the "UK" and "US" inside the square brackets corresponds
to the block names chosen earlier. You could have called these
whatever you like within certain limits. They can be up 70 characters long
but mustn't contain spaces; backslash '\' or slash '/'; comas, semicolons,
equals sign '=' or square brackets '[' and ']'.
Lets look at another scenario, three users. They all have to have a
CD-ROM driver loaded, one likes to use US settings, another prefers UK
settings the last likes Hungary date settings and wants ANSI.SYS loaded.
The CONFIG.SYS file will look like this:
[MENU]
Menuitem=User1
Menuitem=User2
Menuitem=User3
[COMMON]
device=C:\DOS\OAKCDROM.SYS /D:MSCD0000
[User1]
Country=044
[User2]
Country=001
[User3]
Country=036
device=C:\DOS\ANSI.SYS
The "[COMMON]" block can be used whenever a command common to all menu items
needs to be executed, in this case a CD-ROM driver needs to be loaded.
The next weird thing is that there is no text specified to be displayed as
there was before. The text is optional, if none is specified the block name is
printed, "User1", "User2" and "User3" in this case.
To finish of this brief overview I'll show you how to change
the commands run in AUTOEXEC.BAT depending on the selection made at the
menu. With the above scenario in mind look at this AUTOEXEC.BAT file:
goto %config%
:User1
echo User1 option selected!
goto exit
:User2
echo User2 option selected!
goto exit
:User3
echo User3 option selected!
:exit
Not very useful but you could put whatever you wanted instead of or
as well as echo.
The labels obviously depend on the blocknames in CONFIG.SYS. Even if
an option does nothing in CONFIG.SYS you must still have the configuration
block ("[<blockname>]").
You can do other things as well, for more information look up:
- MENUITEM
- MENUDEFAULT
- MENUCOLOR
- SUBMENU
- INCLUDE
DOS Reference
