Can’t stress enough how handy database snapshots (compatible only in Enterprise and Developer editions of SQL Server 2005+) come in when testing bulk imports, data scrubbing, or any sort of data / schema modification script. In nearly no time, I can create a snapshot (via shortcut snippet), run my script – don’t like the results? My script crapped out the data? I can run an instant undo by recovering from the snapshot, which works pretty fast. If I want to create another snapshot, I usually tend to overwrite the snapshot I created, and then create it again.

It’s so handy that I have a snippet for it:

Anywhoot, here’s how you create a snapshot:

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-- CREATING A SNAPSHOT
CREATE DATABASE YourDatabase_snap ON         -- Name of new snapshot
(
  NAME = yourdb_data,                        -- Logical filename of source db you want to snapshot
  FILENAME = 'c:\YourDatabase_data_1800.ss'  -- Sparse file to create
)
AS SNAPSHOT OF YourDatabase;                 -- Source db name

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-- RECOVERING FROM A SNAPSHOT
USE master;
RESTORE DATABASE YourDatabase                    -- Source db name where the data resided
FROM DATABASE_SNAPSHOT = 'YourDatabase_snap';    -- Snapshot db name

Deleting a snapshot is just like dropping a database.

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DROP DATABASE YourDatabase_Snap

I needed to delete 30,000 files that took about 60 GB. I know traditionally it takes forever to delete it in Windows. Even using the “del” command in the console, it’s always been slow for me. Enter Robocopy. I never gave it a chance until today. The way it can delete is by syncing directory against an empty one which was just what I needed. It was able to do it in about 50 seconds. Awesome.

You’ll have to download Robocopy as part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools.

What I used to delete this big directory:

robocopy /MIR c:\empty-directory c:\my-files-to-delete

Winrar is a great tool used for compressing files. It also has a command line tool called “rar.exe” to compress files, in case you want to batch it up. Here’s an example of the most common switches I use.

"C:\Program Files\WinRAR\rar.exe" a -m5 -r -ep1 "C:\temp\Work\Upgrades\2010-02-06\111.rar" "C:\temp\Work\Upgrades\2010-02-06\Post-Upgrade\"

First path is the location of the rar file to create. The second path is either the location of the file(s) or directory to compress.

options used
 
  -ep1  Exclude base directory from names
  a     Add files to archive
  -r    Recurse subdirectories (will compress entire directories)
  -m5   Set compression level to maximum

You can even assign a password to it using the -p switch

You know what, I tried PowerShell and I guess I never got used to it. I’ve been using DOS for the longest time that I prefer its simplicity when navigating through files. As far as scripting with it – forget it – it’s very cryptic and limiting, not to mention awkward. That’s why for scripting now I’m using Python. Nonetheless though, I sometimes need a playing field to run the scripts for, or running console utilities. That’s where Console2 comes in.

Console2 is a great tool that provides tabbing (you can tab through multiple consoles) and several ways to customize the UI. Here’s an example:

I prefer this configuration:

How I Have It Setup

Download Console2:

• 32-bit Version
• 64-bit Version

I have the Console2 open up when I hit CTR+\ via AutoHotkey. Here’s the snippet for this to happen in AutoHotkey. I have this run when Window starts (it must stay in memory).

^\::Run C:\dan-local\dos-win\Console.exe

Change the CMD prompt by creating a PROMPT system variable:




Download the Console2 Config File

Other Tips

Autocomplete
Good tip about command console = CTRL+I
can select files in the current directory, kinda like autofill-in
you can also put in parts of the file and it autoputs it for you

Rename tab
CTRL+R

New Tab with default transparency
CTRL+F1

New Tab with lighter transparency
CTRL+F2

Switch to NEXT adjacent tab
CTRL+TAB

Switch to Previous adjacent tab
CTRL+SHIFT+TAB

CTRL+[NUMBER]
Goes to the tab instance. To make it easier, it’s best if you rename your tabs,

[INSTANCE NAME].[NAME OF TAB]

So for example,

1.Batch File
2.wget list
3.ftp the files

In my last post, I made a quick script that checks for the date. It was very limiting, since it used the dir command. This one uses several date/time Python modules and is more capable.

import os, os.path, stat, time
from datetime import date, timedelta, datetime
 
# Reference
# http://docs.python.org/library/datetime.html
# http://docs.python.org/library/time.html
 
def getFileDate( filenamePath ):    
 
  used = os.stat( filenamePath ).st_mtime      
  year, day, month, hour, minute, second = time.localtime(used)[:6]
  objDateTime = datetime(year, day, month, hour, minute, second)
 
  return objDateTime
 
  # Ways to reference this DateTime Object
  # objDateTime.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %I:%M %p")
  # objDateTime.year
  # objDateTime.month
 
 
def isDaysOldFromNow( filenamepath, days ):
 
  # Checks how old a file is. Is it older than "days" [variable] days?
  inTimeRange = False  
  timeDeltaDiff = ( datetime.now()-getFileDate( filenamepath ) ).days
 
  # Check if the file's date is days old or less:
  if ( timeDeltaDiff >= days ):
    inTimeRange = True  
 
  return inTimeRange
 
fname = "C:/temp/decision2.pdf"  
 
# Set this variable to check if the file is this days old
howOld = 3
 
 
if ( isDaysOldFromNow( fname, howOld ) ):
  print fname, "is more than", howOld, "days old"
else:
  print fname, "is NOT more than", howOld, "days old"

Output:

Sometimes log files bog a system down. For one of our servers, I made this little Python script that compresses (via WinRAR) the log files in a directory, and then moves them to a backup location. The only little catch is that I wanted to leave the latest log files for in that directory. Log files are created daily, so the the latest log files have a datestamp of today. Here’s how I did it.

First Create the Python Script:

import os
import datetime
 
dateStamp  = datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d") 
imsLogPath = 'd:\\LogFiles\\'                     
# Don't use a mapped drive but use UNC for network drives. Task Schedule seems to choke when it calls Python.
newRARPath = '"\\\\192.168.1.2\\Root\\backups\\' + dateStamp + '.rar"'
rarPath    = '"C:\\Program Files\\WinRAR\\rar.exe" a -m5 ' + newRARPath 
 
# Get Latest Files
smtpLatest   = os.popen(r"dir /od /a-d /b " + imsLogPath + "SMTP*.log").read().splitlines()[-1]
postLatest   = os.popen(r"dir /od /a-d /b " + imsLogPath + "POST*.log").read().splitlines()[-1]
ischedLatest = os.popen(r"dir /od /a-d /b " + imsLogPath + "iSched*.log").read().splitlines()[-1]
relayLatest  = os.popen(r"dir /od /a-d /b " + imsLogPath + "Relay*.log").read().splitlines()[-1]
qengLatest   = os.popen(r"dir /od /a-d /b " + imsLogPath + "Qeng*.log").read().splitlines()[-1]
 
# Get List of All Files
allFiles     = os.popen(r"dir /od /a-d /b " + imsLogPath + "*.log").read().splitlines()
 
# Remove Latest Files from All Files List
allFiles.remove( smtpLatest )
allFiles.remove( postLatest )
allFiles.remove( ischedLatest )
allFiles.remove( relayLatest )
allFiles.remove( qengLatest )
 
# allFiles Array Has the list of files
 
# Flatten Array allFiles to be used as a parameter in system command
flatLogPathList = ""
for filenameWithPath in allFiles:
  flatLogPathList = flatLogPathList + imsLogPath + filenameWithPath + " "
 
 
# Execute WinRar
path = rarPath + " " + flatLogPathList.rstrip()
os.system( '"' + path + '"' )
 
# Delete all log files
os.system( '"del ' + flatLogPathList.rstrip() + '"' )

Then I set up the Scheduled Task:

With these Settings:

I often use both Winamp and my iPhone to listen to music. These two, unfortunately, show the time differently in the songs. Winamp displays the time in minutes (mm) while the iPhone does it hour/minutes (hh:mm). Here’s a quick little script I whipped together because I’m too lazy to do this in my head, especially for audio books where an audio book can be over 500 minutes, and I need to convert to iPhone time because I want to continue listening where I had just left off on Winamp.

use POSIX qw(ceil floor); # used for the floor function
 
sub GetToken {
  # @_ = flatten args list from an array
  # @_[0] = first argument
 
  $data      = @_[0];
  $delimiter = @_[1];
  $token     = @_[2] - 1;
 
  @tokens_array = split($delimiter, $data);   
 
  return @tokens_array[$token]; 
}
 
sub chr_conver_min {  
  if (length(@_[0]) == 1) {
    return "0".@_[0];
  }
  else {
    return @_[0];
  }   
}
 
 
sub iphone_time_convert {
 
  # converts winamp time to iphone - winamp stores time only in minutes.  
  # @_[0]   =  winamp_time, e.g. 124:34
  # $hour   = floor($winamp_time/60);
  # $minute = $winamp_time % 60;
 
  $winamp_hour_min = GetToken(@_[0], ":", 1);  
  $winamp_seconds  = GetToken(@_[0], ":", 2);  
 
  return floor($winamp_hour_min/60).":".chr_conver_min( ($winamp_hour_min % 60) ).":".$winamp_seconds;
 
}
 
 
sub winamp_time_convert {  
 
  # converts iphone time to winamp  
  # @_[0] = iphone_time, e.g. 3:43:34    
  $iphone_hour     = GetToken(@_[0], ":", 1);  
  $iphone_min      = GetToken(@_[0], ":", 2);    
  $iphone_seconds  = GetToken(@_[0], ":", 3);
 
  return (($iphone_hour * 60) + $iphone_min).":".$iphone_seconds;
 
}
 
sub show_help {
  print "\nDisplays the conversion of time between winamp and iPhone.\n\n";
  print "   winamptime [-w2i|-i2p] [mm:ss][hh:mm:ss]\n\n";
  print "Example to convert winamp time to iPhone: \n\n";
  print "   winamptime -w2i 212:41\n\n";
  print "Example to convert iPhone time to winamp, seconds being optional: \n\n";
  print "   winamptime -i2w 2:31:41\n";
  print "   winamptime -i2w 2:31\n\n";
}
 
 
# START
 
# Optimize this:
if( $ARGV[0] eq "-w2i" ) 
{
  # winamp to iphone time
  if ( length($ARGV[1]) > 0 ) {
    print "iPhone Time: ".iphone_time_convert( $ARGV[1] )."\n";
  }
}
elsif( $ARGV[0] eq "-i2w" ) 
{
  # iphone to winamp time
  if ( length($ARGV[1]) > 0 ) {
    print "Winamp Time: ".winamp_time_convert( $ARGV[1] )."\n";
  }
}
else 
{
  show_help();
}

Output:

Recently, I needed to do some work from the Windows Command Line, and I needed to deal with a few images. Along the way, I found some great tools. All these tools are free. Can come in useful when automating.

Manipulation

ImageMagick – This is a collection of command line tools. You can do image conversion, view properties, transform, transparency, join, overlay, add special special effects, and tons more. Also has APIs for C, C++, Java, .NET, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and others. Highly recommend it.

Screen Capture

CmdCapture – Takes a screenshot of your desktop from the command line.

IECapt – Capture Internet Explorer’s rendering of a web page into a BMP, JPEG or PNG image file.

Cutycapt – Capture WebKit’s rendering of a web page into a variety of vector and bitmap formats, including SVG, PDF, PS, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, and BMP.

wkhtmltopdf – Convert HTML to PDF using the Webkit rendering engine, and Qt.

If you want to unlock files in Windows many of us know to use Unlocker. It’s a handy tool that I use often when a pesky process has a handle on a file. But what if you want to write a script that unlocks files from the command line. Welcome the tool “Handle” from Sysinternals by Mark Russinovich.

Then you could loop through the list of files by doing so.

I thought this might be useful for those who are constantly uploading the same files. Whether you need to deploy a project live or constantly upload the same group of files, you can do this by creating a batch file in Windows using ftp.exe.

First of all, if you’re not familiar with FTP.exe, it’s just a command console way to upload/download files from an FTP server. You can run this program and start typing away…. OR, you can load a text file filled with FTP commands in FTP.exe. For example, the following are commands in a file called upload.bs:

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open western.dreamhost.com
username
password
binary
hash
send index.htm
send frame.htm
send car.jpg
bye

The above should be straightforward. The “open” command is used to connect to the FTP server. The “username” should be your usename and “password” should be your actual password. “binary” is how your data should be handled on transfer – if it’s not text, it’s binary data, and should be “binary.” “hash” makes the console display pound signs (#) to serve as a progress bar as it’s uploading to the server. The “send” commands are used to upload the files. “bye” is exits the FTP session.

That was just a FTP script session file. You now need to call that file from FTP.exe on WindowsXP. You do that as follows:

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@%windir%\system32\ftp.exe -s:upload.bs

You can include that call in a file called “upload.bat” – To learn more about FTP scripting and how to merge the two files into just one batch file, you can check out this site. Also, there’s more information about this found here: tinyapps.org.