Rob van der Woude's Scripting Pages

News Archives 2015 Q1

 

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March 30, 2015 WMIAlias.bat, a spin-off of one of my projects, translates WMIC aliases to their "target" WMI class name.
March 26, 2015 • Basic Hardware Inventory (Hardware.hta) has been updated:
  • a new optional switch /DMIDECODE uses DMIDecode to add DMI/SMBIOS data to several Details pages,
  • the /SAVE switch's functionality was improved,
  • and some quirks and bugs reported by Steve Robertson were fixed.
Thanks Steve
March 11, 2015 • "Explorer" pointed out that to prevent unexpected DIR behaviour by DIRCMD settings, you don't need /P/-P or /W/-W workarounds; problems can be prevented by temporarily resetting DIRCMD:

SETLOCAL
SET DIRCMD=
DIR whatever
ENDLOCAL


He also pointed out that DIR's /A:L switch works in Windows 2000 and later, though it didn't make it into the help text before Windows 7.

Thanks "Explorer"

• Pascal Gilis pointed out an omission in my description of the TIMEOUT command: it has an optional /NOBREAK switch to prevent abortion of the delay by pressing any key (though you can still abort the delay using Ctrl+C).

Thanks Pascal
February 10, 2015 ListProgs.exe had a minor update to make it work "as designed" in 64-bit Windows, i.e. list 32-bit as well as 64-bit programs.
February 2, 2015 WGetIE.exe is a spin-off of another project: it saves the body of a web page to a file, using Internet Explorer to "interpret" and capture dynamic content.
January 17, 2015 PrintScreen.exe has been updated: when saving the console buffer, the text is trimmed at the end; and command line parsing has been improved.
January 14, 2015 • Because ListProgs.bat is terribly slow, I "ported" it to a compiled C# executable: ListProgs.exe.
As expected, the executable is a lot faster than the batch file: about 9..870 times as fast (results vary enormously)!
But what's more important: the executable uses .NET regular expressions, whereas the batch file is limited to FINDSTR type regular expressions.
I simplified the command line arguments: /A is no longer required (nor, in fact, allowed) with /S, it is implied.

• To make ListProgs.bat's command line arguments equal to ListProgs.exe's, I had to modify ListProgs.bat slightly.
January 13, 2015 • Another update for ListProgs.bat: its output is now always sorted by name (DisplayName).
The cost? Increased complexity of the code, a marginal performance penalty, and the batch file will fail if a software manufacturer were to use an equal sign in the program's DisplayName.
January 12, 2015 • I fixed a bug in Kolor.exe's check for updates (/U switch): it failed because the capitalization of the query was incorrect, whereas the test is case sensitive.
January 11, 2015 Kolor.exe is a new batch tool to replace CMD.EXE's internal COLOR command.
Unlike COLOR, which changes the colors for the entire console, KOLOR only changes the colors for the text following its invocation.
Besides, KOLOR can be used to read the current colors, allowing to correctly restore the initial console colors at the end of a batch file.
January 10, 2015 ListProgs.bat has been updated: it can now list all installed programs either as a list, tab delimited, or in aligned columns.
January 3, 2015 • Carlos Montiers discovered another hidden (or undocumented) dynamic environment variable: %__APPDIR__%
Its value is the parent folder of the application that request the variable's value, with a trailing backslash (like %__CD__%).
So in a CMD window, typing ECHO %__APPDIR__% will show CMD.EXE's parent folder, e.g. C:\Windows\system32\
Likewise, in batch files, CMD.EXE's parent folder is returned too.
In C# and VB .NET, System.Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable( "__APPDIR__" ) returns the executable's parent folder, e.g. D:\VisualStudio\TestAppDir\bin\Release\

Thanks Carlos
January 1, 2015 • A Happy New Year to All of You!

 

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