DOS Novice I would like to know how to set the ping comand. My ISP has a cut off of 5mins cna you please show me how to ping my service provider every 3 minutes (I have there I.P. address) Thankx for any help

If this is real DOS, I don't think you can (since it won't run multiple processes - with the exception of TSRs.) If this is NT, you can schedule things to happen, however I am unsure of if you can say "hey, do this every three minutes" or not. The command for that is 'at'. Look it up in Windows help. If it's 9x, you could write a Batch file to run. An example: @echo off :start cls echo ---[Pinging Server]--- ping -n 1 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx echo ---[Hit 'x' To Exit]--- choice /c:xa /t:180,a /n if errorlevel==2 goto start cls Replace xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx with the IP address you wish to ping and /t:180 with a different number if you don't want 180 s or 3 minutes between pings. Also, the last 'cls' is to close the DOS box that will open with this program.

With NT or 2000 and any one of several Resource Kit executables (like SLEEP.EXE, WAIT.EXE, SOON.EXE, CHOICE.EXE, etc.) you can write a simple batch file that says something like... ---begin file--- top ping -n 1 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx sleep xx goto top ---end file--- Set the sleep time to 4 minutes or so and it will run the ping command in that interval. To reduce traffic, I used the -n 1 switch to say ping only once. However, if the ping fails, it will still wait 4 minutes before trying again. You might want to make it -n 2 or just leave it out altogether. For the post above... "cls" doesn't close a DOS box, it merely clears the screen.