Archived News from Rob van der Woude's Scripting Pages, 2022 Q4

• A bug in AppendSilence.bat has been fixed, it would always append 64 seconds, no matter what length was specified.

• A bug in BatCodeCheck has been fixed: it would corrupt lines that started with whitespace followed by an internal command.

• I installed a new 8TB harddisk in my computer, and while "filling" it, it went to sleep sometimes even when busy copying.
This seems to be a known issue in Windows.
When the computer is woken up again, the mouse sometimes stays asleep.
I tried plugging in another mouse, but unless it is a Bluetooth mouse, I don't get a moving mouse pointer again.
DEVCON to the rescue! A simple batch file with only 2 DEVCON commands restarts the mouse: RestartMouse.bat.

• ListDrives.exe has been updated, error handling has been improved.

• ProgressBar.exe is a new batch tool to display a customizable progress bar.

• DetectSound.exe had a minor update: it now accepts a timeout period of half a second to 600 seconds, and as a result the timeout no longer needs to be an integer.
You may use either a dot or a comma or your system's default for the decimal separator.

• DetectSound.exe is a new command line tool that uses Microsoft's speech recognition technology to detect sound input on the default microphone.
It is based on source code by Wendy Zang on MSDN.

Thanks Wendy

• I added a page on endless loops in batch files, and how to break free from these loops.

• TestSitemap.exe has been updated again:

with its new optional /R switch, Redirections will be counted as errors (i.e. return code will be the sum of errors and redirections)

• TestSitemap.exe has been updated:

the new optional /Q switch (Quiet mode) will make it show errors and redirections only
it will display its progress in the console's title bar
it will show the time it took to test all URLs in its summary

• XPath.bat is a simple wrapper batch file using PHP to display the results of an XPath query against an XML file.

• AppendSilence.bat is a new batch file using FFMPEG to append silence to the end of an existing MP3 file.

• MonitorClipboard.exe has been updated:

a new optional command line switch /CM (Compact Mode) will change the window size to a small bar over the task bar instead of a relatively large modal window at the center of the screen
a new optional command line switch /F:percentage will change the font size (50..150%)

• readword.php is a simple demo script for reading a Word document and showing the plain text either in a web page or in a console — it's that versatile.
To make the script work, make sure you have MS Office installed, and that your PHP.INI contains the following entry:

[COM_DOT_NET]

extension=php_com_dotnet.dll

• In case you're wondering why so many "old" pages on this site appear in the What's New list: I'm updating my web pages to use Unicode emojis instead of images, wherever possible.

• comparesitemaps.php is a simple PHP file to compare 2 XML sitemap files and show the differences.
It needs to run on a (local) web server (e.g. XAMPP), and it may take quite a while to finish, so I increased its time limit from the default (usually 120 seconds) to 15 minutes.
It can be downloaded here.

• StringHash.exe has been updated: it now accepts its input string on the command line or as redirected Standard Input.

• A bug in TestSitemap.exe has been fixed: it would not handle the /XL and /XQ switches correctly.

• TestSitemap.exe is a new command line tool to test all links mentioned in an XML sitemap.

• CompareSitemaps.exe is a new command line tool to compare 2 XML sitemaps, disregarding sort order and comments, and optionally displaying the differences on screen.

• AirRegGUI.ps1 has been updated: it will now show the aircraft type, besides the thumbnail, if it found a match on Airport-Data.com.

• AirRegOpenSkyCmd.ps1 has been updated to match the new database naming convention.

• AirRegPHCmd.ps1 will no longer be updated since the Dutch aircraft registrations database is no longer available for download.
You can still use any existing database you may have downloaded, but it won't be up-to-date...

• CaptureDate.exe has been updated:

it can use Phil Harvey's ExifTool as a "fallback" in case no capture date was found
if ExifTool is used, CaptureDate can now also optionally set the capture date to the file date instead of the other way around

See the program's help text for details.

• Trash.exe is a new command line tool to send files to the recycle bin.
I wrote it to use it with ExifTool and CompareImages.exe (see 2022-09-25 newsitem) to allow recovery of the original image even if no backup was made.

News Archives 2022 Q4