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Windows command line references

Posted Monday, January 28, 2008 2:32 PM by myocom
I found that TechNet has references for the Windows command line utilities. Much of these are just a rehash of the help you'd get with /? but at least they're easier to read... This is a list of commands for Windows Server 2003 (most apply to Windows Read More...
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Definitive list of illegal filenames?

Posted Tuesday, July 11, 2006 12:11 PM by myocom
Earlier , I tried to come up with a definitive list of illegal filesystem names, but it seems this is already documented. Who knew? http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?id=74496 Read More...
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More on command line redirection

Posted Wednesday, May 17, 2006 10:30 AM by myocom
For those of you who are more interested in the gritty details of command line redirection , RaymondC has posted a couple of great articles recently on his excellent The Old New Thing blog. The first discusses how (and more importantly, why ) the redirection Read More...
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Evolution of a solution

Posted Friday, September 30, 2005 10:15 PM by myocom
The other day, someone posted a message at work asking for a way to find out the drive letter for partition 1 on the first disk. The first response offered this: C:>echo list volume | diskpart Microsoft DiskPart version 5.1.3565 Copyright (C) 1999-2003 Read More...
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Making your scripts look prettier

Posted Friday, September 30, 2005 8:48 PM by myocom
Many languages provide a mechanism to make their code look pretty. VBScript, for example, assumes one statement per line, but including an underscore at the end of the line indicates that your statement continues on the next line. Normal WScript.Echo Read More...
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That's a pretty shifty argument...

Posted Thursday, June 30, 2005 1:00 PM by myocom
It's pretty easy to deal with up to 9 arguments in batch through built-in variables %1 through %9 . For example: echoargs.cmd @echo off echo %1 echo %2 echo %3 echo %4 echo %5 echo %6 echo %7 echo %8 echo %9 If you feed this A B C D E F G H I, you'll Read More...
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Ignoring the output of a command

Posted Wednesday, June 08, 2005 5:00 PM by myocom
Earlier , I used >nul 2>&1 to suppress the output of a command, and the question was brought up as to why this was "better" than just >nul . To understand what's going on, you need to know that there are two streams of output from any given Read More...
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Backslashes vs. slashes - who knew?

Posted Tuesday, June 07, 2005 4:45 PM by myocom
Here's something I'd never noticed until today, when I discovered it quite by accident. In general, to run a program in a different directory, you specify the path with backslashes, such as C:\WINDOWS\system32\notepad.exe . This should be no surprise. Read More...
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Bugs and assumptions

Posted Monday, June 06, 2005 11:00 PM by myocom
There's a fine line between an assumption and a bug. If the assumptions are spelled out ahead of time, then it's not a bug if the script does what's expected, taking the assumptions into consideration. Having disclaimed that, then, here are some of the Read More...
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So what the heck just happened there...?

Posted Friday, June 03, 2005 4:30 PM by myocom
In the previous post, there was a fair amount of code and basically no explanation... Here's how it breaks down: Naïve method: set FILENAME=basename-%RANDOM% CMD has a built-in variable called %RANDOM% . Simply put, it returns a random value between 0 Read More...
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Creating unique filenames in a batch file

Posted Friday, June 03, 2005 4:15 PM by myocom
Someone today was asking how to create unique filenames. They had some process which ran in a loop, and they wanted to direct the output of that process to a file, but rather than always overwriting the same file, they wanted to keep history using distinctive Read More...
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Two quick file-manipulation scripts from the vault

Posted Friday, June 03, 2005 5:15 PM by myocom
There are a couple of scripts that have been with me since the beginning of time. I don't use them that much anymore, but they occasionally come in handy. I'm always pleasantly surprised to find that I still have them when I need them. One makes files Read More...
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Laziness is a virtue

Posted Friday, June 03, 2005 5:00 PM by myocom
Some scripts are complex and do lots of cool stuff. Others are simple and save a bunch of time. I have a couple of scripts which prove to be so useful that I don't know when I'm using them anymore. I tend to type faster than I think (or get my fingers Read More...
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