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PASSING PARAMETERS TO A PROGRAM
Suppose you have a DOS program you use, normally
in a DOS session where you type in the name of the
program followed by a parameter that specifies some sort
of input. For example, I have a little freeware utility
called BROWSE that can be used to display a page at a
time of an ASCII text file to the screen, and where you
use the <PgUp> and <PgDn> keys or the Up and
Down arrows to maneuver around the file; and you close
the program by hitting the <Esc> key. If I wanted
to run BROWSE.COM on a text file called READ.ME, for
instance, I would type in the DOS command "BROWSE
READ.ME" while at the command prompt.
How would this sort of thing be done within Windows
without going into a DOS session? Well, after you get
into Explorer and create a shortcut for the BROWSE.COM
program, if you click on it, in this particular case the
program doesn't run, because it expects you to have
already specified an input file. In order to accomplish
that, you right-click on the shortcut to access the
context menu, click on Properties, then click on the
Program tab, click on the line "Cmd-line" which
specifies the full path to your program
("C:\UTIL\BROWSE.COM" in my case), and add a
space followed by a question mark (?) to the end of that
line. The question mark specifies that the program
expects a run-time parameter. So now when you click on
the shortcut for Browse, you first get a dialog box where
you can type in the name of the file you want to browse,
and then the program runs properly.