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Archive for the ‘Batch-Files’ Category

Windows 10 and 11: installing WSL2 does not require winget, Chocolatey or Scoop

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/18

After using Chocolatey for a long time and writing about it, I have written a few articles on other Windows package managers like winget and Scoop.

Part of the reason was that I wanted to install new systems in a semi-automatic way including WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux 2).

As I have spent quite some time getting treated against metastasised rectum cancer, I missed part of the evolvement of WSL into WSL2 and of the winget evolvement.

The good news is that this simplified the scripted installation of WSL2 a lot, as over time, this got very easy, as confirmed in these posts/messages I found via [Wayback/Archive] winget wsl2 – Google Search:

[Wayback/Archive] [Package Request] WSL 2 · Discussion #3669 · microsoft/winget-pkgs

wsl --install is now available in Windows 10 2004 and above. I think that’s a better solution rather than winget having a special case for it.
[Wayback/Archive] How to Install WSL 2 on Windows 10 (Updated) – OMG! Ubuntu!
to install WSL 2 on Windows 10 OS Build 2004 or later you need to open the command prompt app with Administrator permissions, and enter the following command:
```
wsl.exe --install
```
As soon as you hit enter, the process automatically gets to work. It enables the WSL optional features required, fetches the latest WSL Linux kernel version, and installs Ubuntu as your default distro

I even found back this was announced when I was still in hospital: during the Build 2020 conference. A summary is at [Wayback/Archive] The Windows Subsystem for Linux BUILD 2020 Summary – Windows Command Line describing the introduction of wsl.exe --install and that it defaults to install WSL 2 as back-then already most Windows Insider build users using WSL had switched from WSL 1 to WSL 2.

Back to installing

Yesterday, in Windows “equivalents” for bash backticks in cmd and PowerShell, I showed how to get the wsl.exe information:

C:\temp>PowerShell -Command "SigCheck "$((Get-Command -CommandType Application wsl).Path)""

Sigcheck v2.82 - File version and signature viewer
Copyright (C) 2004-2021 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

c:\windows\system32\wsl.exe:
        Verified:       Signed
        Signing date:   09:24 15/10/2021
        Publisher:      Microsoft Windows
        Company:        Microsoft Corporation
        Description:    Microsoft Windows Subsystem for Linux Launcher
        Product:        Microsoft« Windows« Operating System
        Prod version:   10.0.19041.1320
        File version:   10.0.19041.1320 (WinBuild.160101.0800)
        MachineType:    64-bit

This was on one of my Windows 10 systems with version 21H2.

The installation progress was as follows and took ome 3 minutes on a 50 Mibit/s fiber connection:

C:\temp>wsl.exe --install
Installing: Virtual Machine Platform
Virtual Machine Platform has been installed.
Installing: Windows Subsystem for Linux
Windows Subsystem for Linux has been installed.
Downloading: WSL Kernel
Installing: WSL Kernel
WSL Kernel has been installed.
Downloading: Ubuntu
The requested operation is successful. Changes will not be effective until the system is rebooted.

Time to play around (:

–jeroen

Posted in Batch-Files, Chocolatey, Development, Power User, Scoop, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development, winget, WSL Windows Subsystem for Linux | Leave a Comment »

Windows “equivalents” for bash backticks in cmd and PowerShell

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/17

A while ago, I needed the file information of wsl.exe on one of my Windows systems.

On Linux, I would do something like file `which bash` where file will give the file details and which gets you the full path to bash.

The file equivalent on Windows for me is [Wayback/Archive] Sigcheck – Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs, which is part of [Wayback/Archive] File and Disk Utilities – Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs.

The which equivalent on Windows for me is [Wayback/Archive] where | Microsoft Docs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in bash, Batch-Files, CommandLine, Development, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Disabling the Windows 10 news (and weather) feeds

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/11

I finally got annoyed enough to figure out how to disable the Windows 10 news (and weather) feeds.

At first I thought the solution in this post worked for Windows 11 as well, but re-testing in Windows 11 it does not or does not (or not any more: given so many new Windows 11 releases with ever changing functionality I’m not surprised).

Disable Windows news feeds for current user

Failure: just disabling the news feed will automatically get it reset by `explorer.exe`

Based on the below sources, I made this small batch file:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Registry Files, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

Restart Windows explorer with an UAC administrator token

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/10

Sometimes, you want to restart the Windows explorer. This is already an exception case which you want to do when explorer hangs (for instance when taskbar icons do not respond any more), or has files locked which need to be modified. I described the latter in Inno Setup: Program Folder not showing up In Start > All Programs , with this very simple restart script:

taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe
start explorer

Even more exception is wanting to run explorer with a UAC elevated administrative token. I sometimes do this when moving around stuff from other users on the same computer without having them logged on (as that would lock the files or directories to be moved around).

The risk of running explorer under UAC elevation, is that any program you start will also start UAC elevated, so beware what you ask for…

This is how you start explorer under UAC elevation:

pwsh.exe -nol -noni -nop -w hidden -c "taskkill /f /im explorer.exe; start explorer -v runas -a /nouaccheck"

or if you run an older Windows version of PowerShell:

PowerShell.exe -nol -noni -nop -w hidden -c "taskkill /f /im explorer.exe; start explorer -v runas -a /nouaccheck"

These command-line options and verbs are used:

pwsh == PowerShell:
- -nol == -NoLogo
- -noni == -NonInteractive
- -nop == -NoProfile
- -w hidden == -WindowStyle Hidden *
- -c == -Command
See:
- [Wayback/Archive] about_PowerShell_exe – PowerShell | Microsoft Docs
- [Wayback/Archive] about Pwsh – PowerShell | Microsoft Docs
taskkill:
- /F == force close
- /IM == image name (name of .exe file)
See [Wayback/Archive] taskkill | Microsoft Docs.
start == [Wayback/Archive] Start-Process (Microsoft.PowerShell.Management) – PowerShell | Microsoft Docs
- -v == -Verb (in this case runas*)
- -a == -ArgumentList (to explorer)
See [Wayback/Archive] Start-Process (Microsoft.PowerShell.Management) – PowerShell | Microsoft Docs.
explorer
- /nouaccheck == /NoUACCheck**

Time to explain a few:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Batch-Files, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8.1 | Leave a Comment »

llamasoft/polyshell: A Bash/Batch/PowerShell polyglot!

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/03/16

PolyShell is a script that’s simultaneously valid in Bash, Windows Batch, and PowerShell (i.e. a polyglot).

[Wayback/Archive] llamasoft/polyshell: A Bash/Batch/PowerShell polyglot!

Need to check this out, as often I have scripts that have to go from one language to the other or vice versa.

Maybe it enables one language to bootstrap functionality in the other?

The quest

The above polyglot started with a quest to see if I can could include some PowerShell statements in a batch file with two goals:

if the batch file started from the PowerShell command prompt, then execute the PowerShell code
if the batch file started from the cmd.exe command prompt, then have it start PowerShell with the same command-line arguments

The reasoning is simple:

PowerShell scripts will start from the PATH only when PowerShell is already running
Batch files start from the path when either cmd.exe or PowerShell are running

Lots of users still live in the cmd.exe world, but PowerShell scripts are way more powerful, and since PowerShell is integrated in Windows since version 7, so having a batch file bootstrap PowerShell still makes sense.

Since my guess was about quoting parameters the right way, my initial search for the link below was [Wayback/Archive] powershell execute statement from batch file quoting – Google Search.

I have dug not yet into this, so there are still…

Many links to read

These should give me a good idea how to implement a polyglot batch file/PowerShell script.

[Wayback/Archive] powershell execute statement from batch file quoting – Google Search
- [Wayback/Archive] How to execute PowerShell commands from a batch file? – Stack Overflow was a step up into getting to the right queries and got me to:
  - [Wayback/Archive] PowerShell script in a .bat file | Dmitry’s Blog: Cloud, PowerShell and beyond has convoluted solutions (encoding as base64 or into a single string), but are intriguing as these means are often used to disguise code during attacks (be it from red teams or bad guys).
[Wayback/Archive] hybrid powershell batch file – Google Search
- [Wayback/Archive] How to run a PowerShell script within a Windows batch file – Stack Overflow has a first answer that does not support parameters, but does show that quoting enables the use of scripts that have spaces in their filenames (always a pain, but still important to support):
  - This one only passes the right lines to PowerShell:
    
    dosps2.cmd:
```
@findstr/v "^@f.*&" "%~f0"|powershell -&goto:eof
Write-Output "Hello World" 
Write-Output "Hello some@com & again" 
```
    The regular expression excludes the lines starting with @f and including an & and passes everything else to PowerShell.
```
C:\tmp>dosps2
Hello World
Hello some@com & again
```
  but the second answer got me in the below polyglot search query
  - It sounds like you’re looking for what is sometimes called a “polyglot script”. For CMD -> PowerShell,
```
@@:: This prolog allows a PowerShell script to be embedded in a .CMD file.
@@:: Any non-PowerShell content must be preceeded by "@@"
@@setlocal
@@set POWERSHELL_BAT_ARGS=%*
@@if defined POWERSHELL_BAT_ARGS set POWERSHELL_BAT_ARGS=%POWERSHELL_BAT_ARGS:"=\"%
@@PowerShell -Command Invoke-Expression $('$args=@(^&{$args} %POWERSHELL_BAT_ARGS%);'+[String]::Join([char]10,$((Get-Content '%~f0') -notmatch '^^@@'))) & goto :EOF
```
    If you don’t need to support quoted arguments, you can even make it a one-liner:
```
@PowerShell -Command Invoke-Expression $('$args=@(^&{$args} %*);'+[String]::Join([char]10,(Get-Content '%~f0') -notmatch '^^@PowerShell.*EOF$')) & goto :EOF
```
    Taken from http://blogs.msdn.com/jaybaz_ms/archive/2007/04/26/powershell-polyglot.aspx. That was PowerShell v1; it may be simpler in v2, but I haven’t looked.
- [Wayback/Archive] PowerShell polyglot | Microsoft Docs
[Wayback/Archive] powershell polyglot – Google Search
- [Wayback/Archive] Command Line Interpreters: POSIX Shell, Cmd.exe, PowerShell – Hyperpolyglot (a great table with differences between the various command-line interpreters / scripting engines)
- [Wayback/Archive] PowerShell embedded in a batch script, AKA Polyglot script – Microsoft Tech Community (this solution looks very unreadable to me, but that might be because the listing in it is neither indented, nor syntax highlighted)
- [Wayback/Archive] PolyShell: a Bash/Batch/PowerShell polyglot template for input injection : programming
  - [Wayback/Archive] Polyshell : A Bash/Batch/PowerShell Polyglot 2020 gave much insight, especially on the how:
    …
    
    There are quite a few quirks that were leveraged or had to be worked around:
    - All three languages have different escape characters:
      
      Bash: backslash (\)
      
      Batch: caret (^)
      
      PowerShell: backtick (`)
    - Escape characters work inside Bash and PowerShell strings, but not batch strings.
    - Redirects (i.e. < and >) have special meaning in all three languages unless quoted.
    - Redirects don’t have to be at the end of a command.
      
      This is valid Bash/Batch/PowerShell: echo >output.txt "Hello World"
    - Batch is the only language without multi-line strings or comments.
    - Batch treats > as a redirect even when it directly touches a string, but PowerShell doesn’t.
    - Batch script GOTO statements only work when run as a script, not when run interactively.
    - PowerShell’s multi-line comment (<#) must be immediately preceded by whitespace.
    - Bash’s here documents may begin anywhere so long as it’s unquoted and not a comment.
    …
    It also pointed me to the above repository on GitHub, so lets include it here as well:
    - [Wayback/Archive] llamasoft/polyshell: A Bash/Batch/PowerShell polyglot!
[Wayback/Archive] koma-private/Polyglots: PowerShell scripts encapsulated into batch files
I had a short play around with it from a cmd.exe prompt, and it hides that prompt after finishing. Need to figure out why, and if it can be prevented or undone.

The culprit is the below call in [Wayback/Archive] Polyglots/PSWrapper.cmd at master · koma-private/Polyglots · GitHub:
```
hideWindow $script:cmdPid   # Prevent user from closing command prompt
```
- [Wayback/Archive] Embed PowerShell inside a batch file : Dave Amenta
[Wayback/Archive] windows – Strange redirect in Batch/Powershell polyglot – Stack Overflow basically asks all the questions I have (how does a polyglot actually work?)
- [Wayback/Archive] Powerglot – encodes offensive powershell scripts using polyglots
  - [Wayback/Archive] mindcrypt/powerglot: Powerglot encodes offensive powershell scripts using polyglots . Offensive security tool useful for stego-malware, privilege escalation, lateral movement, reverse shell, etc.
    
    Powerglot encodes several kind of scripts using polyglots, for example, offensive powershell scripts. It is not needed a loader to run the payload.
    
    It basically is a Python script that allows you to generate a polyglot from multiple separate scripts.
[Wayback/Archive] powershell batch polyglot – Google Search (still need to check out the results there if I bump into issues creating one myself)
[Wayback/Archive] powershell batch hybrid – Google Search
- [Wayback/Archive] batch-file Tutorial – Batch files and Powershell hybrids
[Wayback/Archive] powershell batch hybrid iex – Google Search (to see if some part of the script could be automatically downloaded by iex, aka [Wayback/Archive] Invoke-Expression (Microsoft.PowerShell.Utility) – PowerShell | Microsoft Docs)
[Wayback/Archive] How to enable execution of PowerShell scripts? – Super User
- [Wayback/Archive] command line – Set up PowerShell Script for Automatic Execution – Stack Overflow
  - [Wayback/Archive] PowerShell polyglot – jaybaz [MS] WebLog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs, which does not exist any more, but this does:
    - [Wayback/Archive] Wrapping some other scripting language inside a batch file – The Old New Thing showing how to do polyglot with Batch Files and either Perl or JavaScript.

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Batch-Files, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Perl, Polyglot, Power User, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

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Archive for the ‘Batch-Files’ Category

Windows 10 and 11: installing WSL2 does not require winget, Chocolatey or Scoop

Back to installing

Windows “equivalents” for bash backticks in cmd and PowerShell

Disabling the Windows 10 news (and weather) feeds

Disable Windows news feeds for current user

Failure: just disabling the news feed will automatically get it reset by `explorer.exe`

Restart Windows explorer with an UAC administrator token

llamasoft/polyshell: A Bash/Batch/PowerShell polyglot!

The quest

Many links to read

The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

Subscribe

Archives

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Blog Stats

Meta title

Tag Cloud Title

Top Clicks

Top Posts

My badges

Twitter Updates

My Flickr Stream

Pages

All categories

Email Subscription

Archive for the ‘Batch-Files’ Category

Windows 10 and 11: installing WSL2 does not require winget, Chocolatey or Scoop

Back to installing

Rate this:

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Like this:

Windows “equivalents” for bash backticks in cmd and PowerShell

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Like this:

Disabling the Windows 10 news (and weather) feeds

Disable Windows news feeds for current user

Failure: just disabling the news feed will automatically get it reset by explorer.exe

Rate this:

Share this:

Like this:

Restart Windows explorer with an UAC administrator token

Rate this:

Share this:

Like this:

llamasoft/polyshell: A Bash/Batch/PowerShell polyglot!

The quest

Many links to read

Rate this:

Share this:

Like this:

Failure: just disabling the news feed will automatically get it reset by `explorer.exe`