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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘CommandLine’ Category

chocolatey-community/chocolatey-test-environment: A testing setup related to how the Chocolatey Package Verifier runs testing. Used for manual testing or prior to submission

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/06/29

On my list of things to play around with: [Wayback/Archive.is] chocolatey-community/chocolatey-test-environment: A testing setup related to how the Chocolatey Package Verifier runs testing. Used for manual testing or prior to submission

It sort of is a standalone version of the [Wayback] Chocolatey Software Docs | Package Verifier Moderation Service that you can use to check Chocolatey package that you develop/modify.

From the github repository README:

Requirements

You need a computer with:

  • a 64-bit processor and OS
  • Intel VT-x enabled (usually not an issue if your computer is newer than 2011). This is necessary because we are using 64bit VMs.
  • Hyper-V may need to be disabled for Virtualbox to work properly if your computer is a Windows box. NOTE: This may actually not be required.
  • At least 10GB of free space.

Setup

To get started, ensure you have the following installed:

  • Vagrant 1.8.1+ – linked clones is the huge reason here. You can technically use any version of Vagrant 1.3.5+. But you will get the best performance with 1.8.x+. It appears you can go up to Vagrant 2.1.5, but may have some issues with 2.2.2 and Windows guests (newer versions may be fine).
  • Virtualbox 4.3.28+ – 6.1.6 (this flows in the selection of Vagrant – 5.2.22 seems to have some issues but newer versions may work fine)
  • vagrant sahara plugin (vagrant plugin install sahara)

NOTE: If you decide to run with version 1.8.1 of Vagrant, you are going to need to set the VAGRANT_SERVER_URL environment variable as described in this forum post, otherwise, you will get an HTTP 404 error when attempting to download the base vagrant box used here.

Related: people wanting to do a similar thing for Linux: [Archive.is] chocolatey/choco: Has anyone ever tried to set up virtual box with linux (e.g. ubuntu) for choco testing ? – Gitter

Yes, it should work for choco newchoco pack, and choco push, running on mono.
[Wayback/Archive.is] https://github.com/chocolatey/choco/runs/3660684196?check_suite_focus=true

There is also a dockerfile available here:
[Wayback/Archive.is] https://github.com/chocolatey/choco/tree/develop/docker

However, as @AdmiringWorm said, there are not any official builds or official support at this time.

In my own private fork of choco however I’m using such interfaces as RestartManager

    //https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/restartmanager/nf-restartmanager-rmstartsession
    [DllImport("rstrtmgr.dll", SetLastError = true, CharSet = CharSet.Auto)]
    static extern int RmStartSession(out uint pSessionHandle,
                                     int dwSessionFlags,
                                     string strSessionKey);

    //https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/restartmanager/nf-restartmanager-rmendsession
    [DllImport("rstrtmgr.dll", SetLastError = true)]
    static extern int RmEndSession(uint pSessionHandle);

    //https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/restartmanager/nf-restartmanager-rmgetlist
    [DllImport("rstrtmgr.dll", SetLastError = true)]
    static extern int RmGetList(uint dwSessionHandle,
                                out uint pnProcInfoNeeded,
                                ref uint pnProcInfo,
                                [In, Out] ProcessInfo[] rgAffectedApps,
                                ref uint lpdwRebootReasons);

those will be windows specific indeed, but I’ll reach them later on.

Tarmo Pikaro

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

How can you export the Visual Studio Code extension list? (via: Stack Overflow)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/06/16

Adapted from [Archive.is] How can you export the Visual Studio Code extension list? – Stack Overflow, presuming that code is on the PATH:

  1. From the command-line interface on MacOS, Linux, BSD or on Windows with git installed:
    code --list-extensions | xargs -L 1 echo code --install-extension
  2. From the command-line interface on MacOS, Linux, BSD or on Windows without git installed:
    code --list-extensions | % { "code --install-extension $_" }

    or, as I think, more clearly (see also [WayBack] syntax – What does “%” (percent) do in PowerShell? – Stack Overflow):

    code --list-extensions | foreach { "code --install-extension $_" }

    or even more explanatory:

    code --list-extensions | ForEach-Object { "code --install-extension $_" }
  3. From the command-line interface on Windows as a plain cmd.exe command:
    @for /f %l in ('code --list-extensions') do @echo code --install-extension %l
  4. On Windows as a plain cmd.exe batch file (in a .bat/.cmd script):
    @for /f %%l in ('code --list-extensions') do @echo code --install-extension %%l
  5. The above two on Windows can also be done using PowerShell:
    PowerShell -Command "code --list-extensions | % { """""code --install-extension $_""""" }"

    Note that here too, the % can be expanded into foreach or ForEach-Object for clarity.

All of the above prepend “code --install-extension ” (note the trailing space) before each installed Visual Studio Code extension.

They all give you a list like this which you can execute on any machine having Visual Studio Code installed and its code on the PATH, and a working internet connection:

code --install-extension DavidAnson.vscode-markdownlint
code --install-extension ms-vscode.powershell
code --install-extension yzhang.markdown-all-in-onex

(This is about the minimum install for me to edit markdown documents and do useful things with PowerShell).

Of course you can pipe these to a text-file script to execute them later on.

The double-quote escaping is based on [Wayback/Archive.is] How to escape PowerShell double quotes from a .bat file – Stack Overflow:

you need to escape the " on the command line, inside a double quoted string. From my testing, the only thing that seems to work is quadruple double quotes """" inside the quoted parameter:

powershell.exe -command "echo '""""X""""'"

Via: [Archive.is] how to save your visual studio code extension list – Google Search

--jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, .NET, bash, Batch-Files, CommandLine, Console (command prompt window), Development, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Software Development, Visual Studio and tools, vscode Visual Studio Code, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Development, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, WSL Windows Subsystem for Linux, xargs | Leave a Comment »

Chocolatey on Windows 7: “You must provide a value expression on the right-hand side of the ‘-‘ operator.”

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/06/08

One of the places explaining a more and more frequent error on Windows 7 installations is [Wayback/Archive.is] “You must provide a value expression on the right-hand side of the ‘-‘ operator.” · Issue #29 · shiftkey/chocolatey-beyondcompare:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Microsoft Surface on Windows 7, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 | Leave a Comment »

A twitter call to say nice things about technology sparked interesting threads

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/05/27

A while ago [Archive.is] Adam Jacob on Twitter: “Let’s say nice things about technology today. I’ll start. If it wasn’t for @lkanies and @puppetize, there is no way we would have been able to adapt as an industry to the rise of the cloud. Quote tweet me with your own.” sparked some interesting threads.

First posts are below; click on them to see the full threads.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Chrome, Configuration Management, Development, DevOps, Firefox, History, IaC - Infrastructure as Code, Infocom and Z-machine, Infrastructure, KVM Kernel-based Virtual Machine, LSI/3ware, Open Source, PDP-11, Power User, PowerShell, Puppet, Python, Qemu, Rust, Safari, Scripting, Software Development, UCSD Pascal, Vagrant, Veewee, Virtualization, Web Browsers, Xen | Leave a Comment »

Chocolatey 1.0.0 got released last week (chocolatey/choco · GitHub)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/24

Last week finally there was the stable [Wayback/Archive] Release version 1.0.0 · chocolatey/choco · GitHub.

So I fixed the Wikipedia page

It was a few days after the 11th birthday “Celebration”: [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software Blog | This One Goes To 11! Celebrating 11 Years Of Chocolatey. Not a really festive post, though it does have a really nice overview of 11 years of Chocolatey history and clearly showing the momentum of it has been a few years behind us.

The thing is: hardly anybody noticed the celebration nor the 1.0.0 release. Being at various 0.* versions for like a decade makes people not follow sudden version bumps closely. I only noticed when updating a bunch of testing VMs of which one had a problem, so I inspected the logs and saw the 1.0.0 version.

So these recent tweets did not gain much attention:

Anyway: the release notes indicate a few things scheduled for 2.0.0. Given the sudden 0.12.0 -> 1.0.0 bump, I have no clue far (or near!) in the future that will be.

It is kind of both a saddening and relieved feeling: like for instance Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange (both in the same age cohort as Chocolatey), Chocolatey is just there and mostly works.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Batch-Files, C#, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

PowerShell debugging in Visual Studio Code: “PowerShell: Launch Current File w/Args” configuration template is missing

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/09

Not sure why, but most of my Visual Studio configurations have the “PowerShell: Launch Current File w/Args” debug configuration template. So here is the JSON you need to add in your launch.json configuration file.

        {
            "type": "PowerShell",
            "request": "launch",
            "name": "PowerShell Launch Current File w/Args Prompt",
            "script": "${file}",
            "args": [
                "${command:SpecifyScriptArgs}"
            ],
            "cwd": "${file}"
        }

The trick is the bold part that prompts Visual Studio for the arguments.

Note: in order to have such a file, you need to have opened a folder in Visual Studio Code first, then open a PowerShell script file from that directory second.

Related:

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, CommandLine, Development, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Windows Defender: adding and removing exclusions from PowerShell (via Stack Overflow)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/16

I use this small script to install or update [Wayback] Chocolatey package NirLauncher (which is the [Wayback] Nirsoft Launcher that has all the [Wayback] Nirsoft freeware tools in it).

powershell -Command Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath "%TEMP%\chocolatey\NuGetScratch"
choco update --yes NirLauncher 
powershell -Command Remove-MpPreference -ExclusionPath "%TEMP%\chocolatey\NuGetScratch"

It works around the issue that many times NirLauncher is marked by anti-virus tools or/and listed on VirusTotal, which means you get an error like this:

NirLauncher not installed. An error occurred during installation:
 Operation did not complete successfully because the file contains a virus or potentially unwanted software.

followed by

Chocolatey upgraded 0/1 packages. 1 packages failed.
 See the log for details (C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\logs\chocolatey.log).

I wrote about this error before Need to research: Nirlauncher v1.23.42 to 1.23.43 upgrade through Chocolatey fails with “Operation did not complete successfully because the file contains a virus or potentially unwanted software.”, and this post is explaining how I got to the above workaround.

Context: I was running Windows Defender (now officially called Microsoft Defender, but most people still use the old name), which is a good baseline anti-virus tool that is included with Windows.

Finding out the location of the offending file

The offending location is not actually in the C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\logs\chocolatey.log file.

I did a small search to see if one could list Windows Defender messages, and there was [Wayback] Use PowerShell to See What Windows Defender Detected | Scripting Blog explaining the Get-MpThreatDetection available since around Windows 8.x.

This little command got what I wanted:

C:\temp>PowerShell Get-MpThreatDetection ^| Format-List ^| Out-String -Width 4096 | findstr /I "nir"
Resources                      : {file:_C:\Users\jeroenp\AppData\Local\Temp\chocolatey\NuGetScratch\a78a5776-0fdd-48c0-8313-9b0107f54cba\hy3odwgw.1dc\tools\nirsoft_package_1.23.44.zip}

A few tricks I used here:

Searching for [Wayback] “chocolatey\NuGetScratch” – Google Search, I found out %Temp%\chocolatey\NuGetScratch is the default value for [Wayback] chocolatey cacheLocation – Google Search. I run default settings, so that is good enough for me.

Adding / removing a recursive folder exclusion to Windows defender

I found [Wayback] Windows Defender – Add exclusion folder programmatically – Stack Overflow through [Wayback] “Windows Defender” exclusion from commandline – Google Search explaining these (thanks [Wayback] gavenkoa!):

Run in elevated shell (search cmd in Start menu and hit Ctrl+Shift+Enter).

powershell -Command Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath "C:\tmp"
powershell -Command Add-MpPreference -ExclusionProcess "java.exe"
powershell -Command Add-MpPreference -ExclusionExtension ".java"

powershell -Command Remove-MpPreference -ExclusionExtension ".java"

This was a short step to these documentation pages (note to self: figure out the origin of the Mp prefix)

Windows Defender still marks individual tools

Of course Windows Defender still marks individual tools as “unsafe” (for instance C:\tools\NirLauncher\NirSoft\mailpv.exe). To alleviate that, you have to permanently add this directory to the exclusion list: C:\tools\NirLauncher.

–jeroen

Posted in CommandLine, Development, NirSoft, Power User, PowerShell, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

VFrontDe/ESXi-Customizer-PS: PowerCLI script that greatly simplifies and automates the process of creating fully patched and customized VMware ESXi installation images

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/11/30

On my list of things to try, as it allows me to have an ISO at hand in case I ever need to quickly re-install a machine to the current patch level (for instance when the USB boot stick breaks down: these things happen in reality): [Wayback] VFrontDe/ESXi-Customizer-PS: PowerCLI script that greatly simplifies and automates the process of creating fully patched and customized VMware ESXi installation images

ESXi-Customizer-PS is a Powershell script that greatly simplifies and automates the process of creating fully patched and customized ESXi 5.x and 6.x installation ISOs using the VMware PowerCLI ImageBuilder module/snapin.

Requirements

  • A Windows computer (XP or newer) with Powershell 2.0 or newer
  • VMware PowerCLI version 5.1 or newer

You can get the code from [Wayback] ESXi-Customizer-PS/ESXi-Customizer-PS.ps1 at master · VFrontDe/ESXi-Customizer-PS.

The old site (which still has most of the documentation) can be reached at two places:

A video showing how to use it is below the signature.

The above links via [Wayback] Custom ESXi ISO with ne1000 driver for install on Intel NUC Frost Canyon – seanwalsh.dev.

 

Oh: you can check if you have a PXE, USB or HDD installation of ESXi via the steps here: Determining the ESXi installation type (2014558) | VMware KB.

More on a failing USB stick later…

 

–jeroen


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Posted in CommandLine, Development, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, ESXi7, Power User, PowerCLI, PowerShell, PowerShell, Software Development, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

Windows 10: remove applications from the uninstall list

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/11/04

After doing Windows upgrades to Windows 10, every now and then I bump into applications that do not fully uninstall themselves and get stuck on the uninstall list (that you get when running appwiz.cpl or browse to the Control Pannel installed programs list).

[WayBack] How to Manually Remove Programs from the Add/Remove Programs List mentions to inspect registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall, but that didn’t include some of the applications.

Then I found [WayBack] Remove entry from Windows 10 Apps & Features – Super User, where the answers mentions two other keys (thanks users [WayBack] Kreiggott and [WayBack] NutCracker):

  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

Neat!

So I made the below PowerShell script to dump installed programs.

It grabs the list of registry keys containing installed software and their registry values, then empirically filters out most values that are also now shown in AppWiz.cpl.

Like database work, the values can have properties having a value or being null. So it’s SQL like expression galore to do the filtering.

This post is slightly related to Still unsolved since 2015 NetBeans: Bug 251538 – Your Installer is Creating Invalid Data for the NoModify DWORD Key which crashes enumeration of the Uninstall Key in at least PowerShell, where I already did (without documenting) some Uninstall spelunking.

## The collection of registry keys gives Name and Property of each registry key; where Property is compound containing all registry values of that key.
## Get-ItemProperty will get you all the values on which you can filter, including a few special PS* values that allow you to browse back to the registry key.

# x86 installs on x64 hardware: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12199372/get-itemproperty-not-returning-all-properties/12200100#12200100
$nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryKeys = (@
(Get-Item HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*)) + 
(Get-Item HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*) + 
(Get-Item HKLM:\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*)
    
#$nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryKeys.GetType().FullName
#$nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryKeys | Get-Member
#$nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryKeys | Out-GridView
#$nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryKeys | Get-ItemProperty | Get-Member
#$nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryKeys | Get-ItemProperty | Out-GridView
#Return
    
$nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryNameValues = $nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryKeys | 
    Get-ItemProperty |
    Where-Object {
        $_.SystemComponent -ne 1 -and $_.NoRemove -ne 1 -and
        $_.UninstallString -ne "" -and $_.UninstallString -ne $null
    }
# Filters out most things that AppWiz.cpl will leave out as well.
# Might need more fine tuning, but is good enough for now.

# PSPath shows the path to the underlying registry key of each value
$nonUninstallableSoftwareRegistryNameValues |
    Select-Object SystemComponent, NoRemove, DisplayName, DisplayVersion, UninstallString, PSChildName <#, PSPath #> |
    Sort-Object DisplayName |
    Out-GridView
# Need to find a good way to output this in a really wide Format-Table text format.

–jeroen

Posted in CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10 | Leave a Comment »

Terminating a script in PowerShell – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/11/03

I have the same problem mentioned in the answer to [WayBack] Terminating a script in PowerShell – Stack Overflow: confused by most answers, and keeping to forget what each method means (there is Exit, Return, Break and (if you love exception handling to do simple flow control), Throw.

So here is the full quote of what [WayBack] User New Guy answered:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »