Archived News from Rob van der Woude's Scripting Pages, 2016 Q1

• SecondChoice.exe had a minor update: it now handles Ctrl+Break more gracefully, though I cannot prevent the Ctrl+Break being passed on to the hosting process (i.e. the batch file will receive the Ctrl+Break too, but SecondChoice.exe will return ErrorLevel 0 just like CHOICE would).

• Allhelp.vbs has been updated: it now includes help for more commands than ever before, including Windows' native printer configuration scripts.

• Andrew Pixley reported a strange quirk in Windows XP's SET command: in XP only (so far), unsetting a variable will raise ErrorLevel 1.
And Arie Quist reported two missing command line switches on my XCOPY page: /B (introduced in Windows Vista) and /J (introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2).

Thanks guys

• SecondChoice.exe, written in C#, is a more advanced version of SecondChoice.bat.
The executable is more like Windows' native CHOICE command, except:

it returns the default value when Enter is pressed
it accepts timeouts up to 86400 seconds (24 hours)
besides spaces, it accepts colons and equal signs between switches and their values (e.g. /C 123 or /C:123 or /C=123 are all accepted)
it allows a space in the list of choices, if that list is doublequoted, e.g. /C " ABC" or /C:" ABC" or /C=" ABC"
but unfortunately, it doesn't "capture" Ctrl+Break quite as elegantly as CHOICE does.

• SecondChoice.bat is a spin-off of a current project.
It presents a list of choices and waits for the user to either pick a choice and press Enter, or just press Enter for the default choice.
I wrote it because, though Choice supports a default value with its optional /D switch, the default can only be triggered by a timeout, not by pressing Enter.

• GetProductVersion.vbs has been updated: besides executables and MSI files, it will now also handle DLLs and HTAs.

• And a minor update to InputBox.exe: some errors in the text for the "mask language" have been corrected.

• To allow scheduled tasks (running with credentials other than the logged on user's) to display messages with MessageBox.exe, MessageBoxOptions.ServiceNotification has been added to the MessageBox's options.
And to be more flexible in complex command lines (e.g. MessageBox.exe in FOR loops), the program now also accepts octal escape sequences for linefeeds, tabs and single as well as doublequotes. Check the program's help screen for details.

• GetProductVersion.vbs is a new script that returns the product version of the specified .exe or .msi file.
It is based on code by Maputi and Arnout Grootveld on StackOverflow.com.

Thanks guys

• A bug in Which.exe has been fixed: it no longer breaks on copying results to the clipboard.

• Filip Radtke reported problems with PrintAny.exe: he could not print PDFs to a network printer.
After a lot of "soul searching" I found out that WMI is not aware of all network printers.
The new optional command line switch /NP (No Printer check) skips the check if the printer is known in WMI.
Another problem is that though Adobe Reader DC seems to work fine using its Print or PrintTo verbs, it does not work for network printers: nothing is sent to the printer, but no error message is returned.
The new optional command line switch /NV (No Verbs) forces PrintAny to use only the Print or PrintTo command as found in the registry.

Thanks Filip

• DeDup.exe is a new batch utility to remove duplicate lines from a text file or from redirected input.
It will send its results to the screen (Standard Output).
It accepts optional command line switches to ignore case, ignore whitespace, trim the output lines, and/or sort the output.

• Oops, DeDup.exe's first bug has been fixed: it would crash on the combination of redirected input and command line switches.

• Two more bugs in Basic Hardware Inventory (Hardware.hta) were fixed, both reported by Steve Robertson.
Steve spent a lot of time in tracking the bugs and testing the changes, for which I am truly grateful.
Besides bug fixes, the HTA no longer demands elevated privileges, though they are still recommended for full details (e.g. keyboard, mouse, monitor).
You can now skip the test for elevated privileges with the new /NOADMIN command line switch, or the HTA will prompt you to either restart itself with elevated privileges or continue without them.

Thanks Steve

• If cookies are enabled, you can now hide the ChangeDetection explanation block at the top of this page by clicking the red

at the top right corner.

• Steve Robertson reported some bugs in Basic Hardware Inventory (Hardware.hta) when running in Windows 8.1, and some recommendations for fixes.
The same bugs also occurred in Windows 10.
The most annoying bug was failing monitor detection in Windows > 7, which was fixed by completely rewriting the code.
The old HTA used to read the monitors' raw EDID data from the registry; "decrypting" this data is complex and not too reliable.
Since Windows Vista introduced a WMI class to extract the data, it is no longer necessary to do it the hard way.
So if you are still using Windows XP, consider keeping your old version of the HTA instead of updating it!
While working on the fix, I also added some new features I had been postponing for a while: keyboard shortcuts and tooltips with the inventory results (so you can view the full results by hovering over a field, instead of clicking and scrolling).
For a complete list of changes, see the HTA's web page.

Thanks Steve

• The new Attic Numerals Converter (AtticNumerals.hta) is a derivate of my Roman Numerals Converter (Romans.hta).
Attic numerals date back even further than Roman numerals.
To input Attic numerals, a button array is used — a bit more awkward than Roman numerals, due to the fact that not all "numbers" have a keyboard equivalent.
The self-contained HTA uses embedded images for those "numbers".

• SecStat2.vbs has been updated: error handling has been improved.

• Word2Any.exe has been updated: it now accepts an optional page range, which will then be converted and saved, instead of the entire document.
See Word2Any.exe's help text for details.

• SecStat2.vbs is a new script to show an overview of Windows SecurityCenter2 and Windows Update status.
For Windows Vista and later versions, it replaces SecStat.vbs, which runs only in Windows XP SP2 or SP3.

• The WMI Code Generator has been updated: I added a search field as an alternative to scrolling through long lists of class names.

• Kevin Ridenhour's tip on checking for elevated privileges made me decide to dedicate a new web page to the subject: Check and Set Elevated Privileges.

• Kevin Ridenhour sent me a brilliantly simple and reliable way to check for elevated privileges:

WHOAMI /groups | FIND "12288"

FIND will return an errorlevel 0 if the command is run from an elevated process, or 1 if not.

Thanks Kevin

• PowerPoint2Any.exe was the next logical step after Word2Any.exe and Excel2Any.exe.
It was a bit trickier than its siblings, though, because the available output file types aren't all acceptable: bitmap file types or RTF can be specified as output file type for PowerPoint.Application...SaveAs, but doing so will only throw an exception.
So PowerPoint2Any.exe will not accept these file types. As with its siblings, run it with the /T switch to list all accepted file types.

• A bug in Word2Any.exe has been fixed: it would throw an error if no wildcards were used at all and no file type was specified.

• Excel2Any.exe is Word2Any.exe's new sibling: it will open the specified spreadsheets in Excel, and save them in any specified format, if known to Excel.

• Basic Hardware Inventory (Hardware.hta) has been updated:

in the Settings screen, a button allows you to delete an existing DxDiag XML file once, even if the HTA is set to keep existing XML files
also in the Settings screen, a "Theme" section has been added, allowing complete customization of the HTA's colors
the "Theme" settings can also be changed using optional command line switches; see the HTA's Help page for details

• For some obscure reason, I always assumed one could not automate Microsoft Office with Visual Studio Express Editions.

That was a flawed assumption!

To prove it is possible, I wrote Word2Any.exe, which is the C# version of Word2Any.vbs.
Like the VBScript version, it opens Microsoft Word documents and saves them in any file format known to Word.
And like the VBScript version, to get a list of all available file types, use the program's /T switch.
Some advantages of the C# version over the VBScript version:

the C# version is obviously faster than the VBScript version, especially so for multiple input files (wildcards in the input file name)
the C# version accepts any valid wildcard combination for the input file name, whereas the VBScript version only accepts either a name without wildcards, or a single "*" wildcard for its file name
the C# version does not assume, but checks which file formats are supported (it still needs the Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS Add-in for 2007 Microsoft Office to make Word 2007 save files in PDF or XPS format, though)

• Word2Any.vbs is a new script to open Microsoft Word documents and save them in any file format known to Word.
To get a list of all available file types, use the script's /T switch.
You can now forget all my previous Word2*.vbs scripts. 😉

• Lily Ward asked me to add a link to TheTimeNow.com on my Date and Time page, as it is much more accessible for sight impaired individuals than TimeAndDate.com.
Consider it done.

Thanks for the tip, Lily

• Word2PDF.vbs, a script to open Microsoft Word documents and save them as PDF files, has been updated:

wildcards are allowed for the file name of the Word document (only if replacing the entire name, e.g. "*.docx")
an optional alternate output path can be specified (not allowed if wildcards are used in the Word file specification)
silently overwriting existing PDF files no longer is the default, this now requires the optional /O switch
error handling has been greatly improved

News Archives 2016 Q1