The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

  • My badges

    Mastodon

  • Twitter Updates

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,854 other subscribers

Archive for the ‘Batch-Files’ Category

Next Entries »

batch file scripts to get current date and current time in sortable ISO 8601 format

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/01/10

ISO 8601 is a great format for date and time (and combined) values.
It allows for both interchange of information, and ease of sorting values.

Recently, I had to create some backup and logging scripts for a 3rd party turn-key installation at a client.
You know: the kind of installation where the 3rd party manages to break their own scripts, but at the mean time close the system so much, that you cannot do anything but standard batch-file scripts.

The system runs partially on a Workstation that is based on a Dutch version of Windows XP, and a server that runs an English version of Windows Server 2008.
Recipe for some twiddling in order to keep the scripts working on both systems, and not to get bitten by localization.

This answer to a StackOverflow question got me a nice head-start: it was said to work in both the English and Portugese versions of Windows.
This post is the process to get correctly function batch-files towards the end of the post.

Of course, we Dutch are persistent enough to have yet different output for the %date% pseudo variable and the date and date /t commands.
The same holds for the %time% pseudo variable and the time and time /t commands.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Batch-Files, Development, ISO 8601, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP | 4 Comments »

Batch file tricks – double quotes splitting and downloading latest 7-zip

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/09/02

I needed a quick means to download the latest 7-zip from the command-line in Windows.

This batchfile makes use of these tools:

7-zip has a download page that contains lines like these:

    <TD class="Item" align="center"><A href="http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sevenzip/7z465.exe">Download</A></TD>

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, 7zip, Batch-Files, Compression, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, wget | Leave a Comment »

Script to Restart VMware Tools Remotely | Daily Hypervisor

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/08/30

Sometimes the VMware tools need to be restarted in order to get the shared clipboard functionality working again.

From inside a Windows VM, you can do that like this:

net stop vmtools

This will create this output:

The VMware Tools Service service is stopping.

The VMware Tools Service service was stopped successfully.

Then start the service again:

net start vmtools

Giving this output:

The VMware Tools Service service is starting.

The VMware Tools Service service was started successfully.

From outside your virtual machine, you can do it like on this URL using sc: http://www.dailyhypervisor.com/2009/03/25/script-restarting-vmware-tools-remotely/

–jeroen

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

Stopping percentage expansion in a Windows batch file

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/04/09

A while ago, I asked a question on percentage expansion in batch-files on superuser.com: a great site with great answers, similar to stackoverflow.com and serverfault.com , but now for asking “Power User” kind of questions.

The percentage sign (%) in URL‘s is to escape (or  URLencode) characters that should not be in a URL itself.
(Note that the old new thing had a very interesting article on URL encoding: there are many different opinions on how to to this ‘right’, and a few of these ‘right’ opinions are not always compatible with each other).

In Windows batch-files and the command-line, the percentage sign is used to expand environment variables, arguments and for loop indexes.
To make life ‘easier’, inside a batch-file, the percentage sign has a slightly different meaning than on the command-line itself.

This can break your batch-files when you use URL encoded parameters.
It does not matter if these parameters are quoted or not: cmd.exe expands them, unless you escape them properly.

So, the command for downloading the URL with wget (similar to curl) differs from running it on the plain command-line or in a batch-file.

Escaping percentage in batch-files

So the best way to escape percentages in batch files is to double them: each % becomes %%.
There is even a very old (MS-DOS era!) knowledge base article about this topic, that I just found when doing the research for this blog article :-)

URL decode

As a sidenote: manually decode thesed escaped URL’s is always a pain.
There are many sites that can do URL decoding on-line.

PS: This was the original question: How can I stop percentage expansion in a batch file? – Super User.

Posted in *nix, Batch-Files, CommandLine, Development, Encoding, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, URL Encoding, wget | 3 Comments »

Next Entries »