Rob van der Woude's Scripting Pages

News Archives 2015 Q2

 

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June 30, 2015 • Using PrinterSelectBox.exe on an English computer in the Netherlands I found that the localization switch (/L) was of no use, or at least could be improved.
So the latest version allows you to provide your own captions.
See the program's help screen and the samples on the DialogBoxes page for more details.

• The same customization and localization options have also been added to InputBox.exe.
June 29, 2015 • Another update to PrinterSelectBox.exe:
  • the new optional command line switch /L allows Localized button captions for "OK" and "Cancel" (code by Martin Stoeckli)
  • the optional command line switch /P now also accepts alternative "OK" button captions (e.g. /P:"&Go")
  • if no title is specified, and /P is used, the alternative button caption will be used for the title too
Thanks Martin
June 26, 2015 • A minor update to PrinterSelectBox.exe: a new optional command line switch /P changes the "OK" button's caption to "Print", and an error in the help text (default/minimum width) has been corrected.
June 22, 2015 • A new workaround for the tabs issue in DropDownBox.exe: tabs (\t) in the prompt text are no longer ignored, they are now replaced by a number of spaces.
You no longer need to align the text yourself with the proper number of spaces, as long as you use /MF for monospaced font.
The new optional switch /T:tablength allows you to define the maximum number of spaces to use for tabs.
June 19, 2015 • A workaround for an error in DropDownBox.exe: tabs in the prompt text were ignored, I could not get them displayed at all, so I added the optional /MF switch to use a monospaced font.
You will still need to align the text yourself with the proper number of spaces...
June 17, 2015 • A minor update to PrinterSelectBox.exe: autocompletion has been implemented in the combobox.
June 16, 2015 DropDownBox.exe has been updated: tabs are now allowed in the prompt text, autocompletion has been implemented in the combobox, and the help text has been modified to better explain some of the program's features.

• A minor update for allhelp.pl: some special characters (e.g. ellipsis) were replaced to prevent some browsers from garbling the text.
June 15, 2015 • Besides internal command help, allhelp.pl's output now includes reserved words (the ones for which help is available) and CoreUtils.
Sample output is available for Ubuntu 15.04/Linux 3.19.0 64 bits English.
June 13, 2015 allhelp.pl, my "exercise" in Perl/Bash, which displays help for "all" internal commands of the Bourne Shell, has been updated.
Like its Windows counterparts, the new version generates and opens an HTML file with "all" help.
The samples I created are for Ubuntu 15.04/Linux 3.19.0 64 bits English, and Ubuntu 14.10/Linux 3.16.0 32 bits Dutch.
June 10, 2015 • For a new project for Linux I wanted to improve my skills in Perl (rusty at best) and Bash (virtually non-existent), so I wrote allhelp.pl in Perl.
As its name suggests, it is more or less equivalent to my AllHelp for Windows scripts, it displays help for "all" internal commands of the Bourne Shell.
Right now the help is displayed on screen only, HTML output will follow soon.
May 26, 2015 AllHelp.vbs has been updated: besides codepage 850, it now also supports codepages 437 and 1252.
Codepage support is required to "translate" accented letters correctly into HTML entities (e.g. Å in command output must be "translated" to Å in HTML).
More codepages can be added on request.
May 18, 2015 • Oops: a bug in ChkPath.vbs was fixed. It now checks the PATH on the local computer if no computer name is specified on the command line, as it was supposed to do from day 1 (i.e. version 1.00).
May 12, 2015 ChkPath.vbs is the next evolutionary step, after the batch file.
Since folders in the PATH may contain parentheses, I thought it too great a risk to use a batch file to correct errors in the PATH, hence this VBScript version which does correct (i.e. remove) any errors found.
It was only after testing ChkPath.bat on my laptop that I realized the importance of this type of script:
I had almost discarded the laptop after uninstalling Visual Studio 2012 and reinstalling Visual Studio 2010; the laptop became so terribly s-l-o-w...! Nothing seemed to help.
After (manually) removing the invalid entries found by ChkPath.bat from the PATH, the laptop runs smoothly again.

Disclaimer: Make sure you know what you are doing, and have a validated backup plus restore software available before making any changes to system variables 😉
May 11, 2015 ChkPath.bat has been updated: it supports a new optional command line switch /V to display verbose PATH information (i.e. the Full Path, System Path, and User Path) besides testing the validity of each PATH entry.
May 6, 2015 • The bug in Basic Hardware Inventory (Hardware.hta) which prevented inventories of remote computers, has been fixed.
FYI: the offending code was in line 265.
May 5, 2015 • A bug in Basic Hardware Inventory (Hardware.hta) prevents inventories of remote computers.
I'm working on it.
May 2, 2015 • A minor update for DateDiff.exe: it now accepts "Now" as a valid date/time argument.
May 1, 2015 DateDiff.exe was written in C# to check the time since the last backup (for backups that run several times a day).
It will return the timespan between two date/times, in the unit of choice (e.g. years, days, seconds, etc.).
April 26, 2015 • Steve Robertson reported two annoying inconsistencies in Basic Hardware Inventory (Hardware.hta), both of them have been fixed in version 6.04: tab delimited output is now saved with ".txt" extension by default (instead of ".csv" which is generally used for comma delimited), and if without an internet connection, the HTA will no longer suggest to check the website for updates.

Thanks again Steve
April 20, 2015 • Two bugs in Basic Hardware Inventory (Hardware.hta) have been fixed: Steve Robertson reported a bug in the default configuration file path, and on a stand-alone computer without network connection the check for updates would generate an error.

Thanks Steve
April 11, 2015 • Until now, my SCHTASKS page explained the Windows XP version.
Since XP, many new features have been added, so an update was long overdue.
Today, the XP version of SCHTASKS has been moved to its own dedicated page, and the Windows 7 version will be used on "the" SCHTASKS page.
April 9, 2015 • My desktop computer has reached the venerable age of 7 years, but it now either needed a Windows reinstall or I would have to live with 6 cold reboots a day.
Now that I am about to rebuild and reinstall it, I am checking all backups and restore capabilities.
I invested quite some time in setting up scheduled tasks on this computer, so I also checked my old backup procedure for scheduled tasks (copy job files from %windir%\tasks folder).
Surprise, surprise: It no longer worked in Windows 7! Though some tasks do have associated *.job files, most tasks don't.
Enter BackupScheduledTasks.bat.
This simple batch file makes backups of all scheduled tasks in Task Scheduler's root folder, using Task Scheduler's XML export feature.
The batch file also restores selected jobs using Task Scheduler's XML import feature.
Note that where it says "Task Scheduler", the batch file uses its command line equivalent SCHTASKS.EXE.

 

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