Rob van der Woude's Scripting Pages

News Archives 2008 Q3

 

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September 24, 2008 GetUnIns.vbs has been updated: besides literal strings, the new version can also filter using regular expressions, like this one:

CSCRIPT GetUnins.vbs /F:"ˆMicrosoft \.NET Framework [1-9][0-9]*\.[0-9]+ [^\-]*$" /R

which will list all installed .NET Framework versions and their hotfixes, but ignores .NET Framework SDKs.
September 5, 2008 • My NETFxVer.bat, a batch file that listed all installed .NET Framework versions, failed on .NET Framework version 3.5.
When I tried to fix it, it failed again on .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.
So I decided to redesign it from scratch.
Instead of using HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework, the new dNFxVer.bat uses my own GetUnIns.vbs which in turn searches HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall and its subkeys for the names of installed .NET Framework versions.
Unfortunately, though it is more reliable, it is also a lot slower.
August 29, 2008 • I added FfxCache.bat, a batch file that clears the Firefox cache in your profile.
August 28, 2008 • More good (though old) news for PowerShell enthusiasts: Windows PowerShell workbook: server administration by Frank Koch (from Microsoft Switzerland) is available as a free download.
August 27, 2008 • Good news for PowerShell enthusiasts: PowerShell Analyzer is now made available for free, and PowerShell Plus is free for non-commercial use.

• Looking through my site's search logs, I found a returning search for While loops in batch files.
There is no such command in batch files, but it isn't that hard to mimic it, so I added a new Mimic While Loops page to the Batch Techniques' Program Flow section.
August 16, 2008 • I found a great tip by Herby on neowin.net on how to use RUNDLL32 to delete Internet Explorer 7's browsing history, cookies and temporary files:

RUNDLL32.EXE inetcpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess n

A value of 1 for n will delete IE7's browsing history (list of visited sites), 2 will delete all cookies, and 8 will delete all temporary files (cache).
More options can be found on my RUNDLL page.

Thanks Herby
August 10, 2008 • Sébastien Parvy reported an error with the /V (verbose) switch in Recycle.vbs which just didn't seem to work (the /V switch was supposed to ask for confirmation for each individual file before deleting it).
Upon investigation, I doubt it could ever have worked. Oops, so much for testing...
I corrected the error by removing the /V switch from the script.

Thanks Sébastien
August 9, 2008 • Carlitos sent me a batch file to list all mounted removable drives that doesn't require administrative privileges.

Thanks Carlitos
August 7, 2008 • Fernando Sader reported an error in DateFmt.bat: it failed when the system date is prefixed with the day of the week.
The error has been fixed.

Thanks Fernando
July 22, 2008 • Tonight (Dutch time) my website will be moved to a new server in a new data center.
The site may be unavailable for a couple of hours. Sorry for the inconvenience.
To everyone working late for me tonight: thanks and good luck!
July 20, 2008 • A minor update to WMIGen.hta: it now writes the correct URL to its own download location in the generated code.
July 17, 2008 • Today I was faced with a a couple of scheduled FTP scripts that no longer worked.
After some investigation, we found out that this was caused by a sloppy uninstall procedure of some software, which had neglected to remove its directories from the PATH variable. Now that the PATH contained a number of invalid entries, CMD.EXE was no longer able to find any executable, including FTP.EXE. After removing the invalid entries from the PATH everything worked as before.
This made me decide to write ChkPath.bat, which will check if each PATH entry is a valid directory.
July 16, 2008 • I updated WMIGen.hta, my HTA to generate WMI queries in 8 scripting languages. I added a "Help" button, which searches MSDN for a relevant reference page for the selected Class, Method or Property.
To write the help function, this article from Search Engine Roundtable proved invaluable.
July 13, 2008 • I updated GetUnIns.vbs: if available, it will now display the QuietUninstallString instead of the UninstallString.
July 4, 2008 • Not unlike GetPrint.vbs, GetDDE.vbs lists all DDE commands for all registered file types.
July 3, 2008 • Inspired by a script in the making by Denis St-Pierre, Reg2Vbs.vbs, which will read a .REG file and write VBScript code to recreate those registry settings, I wrote Reg2Scr.vbs, which will read directly from the registry and write both KiXtart and VBScript code.
The script has an intimidating amount of code, 435 lines, most of it to support the many different registry value types.
Be careful, this script needs to go through some thorough testing before it will be "production ready".
As always: use it at your own risk!

Thanks, Denis

 

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