Windows 2000 Administration in a Nutshell

Name

logon script

Synopsis

A file containing a series of commands that runs on the client computer when a user logs on to the network.

Description

Logon scripts were used extensively in legacy versions of Windows for helping to configure certain aspects of a user’s environment, such as:

• Connecting mapped network drives to shared folders on file servers

• Starting background processes or foreground applications on the client computer

• Configuring environment variables such as the location of the temporary directory

• Executing other scripts

Logon scripts are an optional feature still supported by Windows 2000, but this is primarily for support of downlevel client computers running legacy versions of Microsoft Windows. For client computers running Windows 2000 Professional and Windows NT Workstation, user profiles are a better way of configuring users’ personal desktop and network settings. However, if you want to administer only minor aspects of users’ environments and don’t want to go to the trouble of configuring and managing user profiles, logon scripts are a useful alternative.

Logon scripts are generally ASCII files that have the extension .bat , a holdover from MS-DOS computing days when batch files were used to run a set of commands without user intervention. A text editor such as Notepad is typically used for creating a logon script. Logon scripts, however, can come in all sorts of other flavors, including:

• ASCII text files in the form of .cmd files

• ASCII text files in the form of windows-scripting ...