Archived News from Rob van der Woude's Scripting Pages, 2024 Q2

• Pages2Txt.bat is a new batch file using OCR to extract text from a *.pages document.
It requires 7-zip as well as Tesseract OCR and optionally MS Word.
Caveat: it will work on most single-page documents, but probably not on multi-page documents (not tested).

• DelTrash.exe has been updated:

if a drive is specified in verbose mode, it will no longer list all drives.
if a listed drive contains only 1 file of 129 bytes, there is nothing to delete from that drive, and it will be ignored

• lens.bat is a new batch file using PHP to read an image's EXIF lens data.

• GetDimensions.exe is a new command line tool to read the dimensions of any type of image that is recognized in Windows Explorer.

• The list of Windows version numbers has been updated.

• Easter.bat has been updated:

it now uses REG.EXE (version 3 or later) instead of REGEDIT
as a result, it no longer requires elevated privileges
and as a consequence it no longer works in Windows NT 4 or 2000
the JDate (Julian Date) function has been updated so it won't crash on leading zeroes

• Oops, looks like CompareVersions.bat had been simplified too much:

return code would always equal 0 => fixed
zero digits were ignored (e.g. 10.0.1 would be treated as 10.1) => fixed
if versions were equal the batch file name would be displayed instead of the highest version => fixed

• CompareVersions.bat has been rewritten and simplified.
Warning: return codes in the new version 2.00 have changed!

• Yesterday.bat has been updated, after Daniele Zanotti reported that its JDate function failed on leading zeroes.
I corrected the error, and will be investigating other batch files as well, as I seem to remember this function was used more than once...

Thanks Daniele

• An error was reported in the Batch HowTo Verify if variables are defined page:

The following code, which works in batch files for all MS-DOS, Windows and OS/2 versions, uses an alternative way to show if a variable is defined or not:

IF "%MyVar%"=="" (ECHO MyVar is NOT defined) ELSE (ECHO MyVar IS defined)

Oops! This is not true, of course, MS-DOS and OS/2 batch interpreters don't support parentheses, nor IF ... ELSE!
The following 2 lines of code are compatible with all batch interpreters, provided %MyVar% itself does not contain doublequotes:

IF "%MyVar%"=="" ECHO MyVar is NOT defined

IF NOT "%MyVar%"=="" ECHO MyVar IS defined

• While browsing my directory of batch files I noticed Obscure.bat, a 20 years old demo batch file demonstrating how URLs can be made to look completely different.
This batch file converted an IPv4 address into a decimal number, but due to 32-bit integer limitations it had to prompt for some manual editing for IP addresses starting with 128 or higher.
It suddenly occurred to me that I might as well try using a hexadecimal number instead of decimal, which can be "computed" without integer math (e.g. 128.10.0.255 can be represented as 0x800A00FF: 128=0x80, 10=0x0A, 0=0x00, 255=0xFF).
This worked for pinging a host — but thank goodness these days the web is protected against abusing this trick, by browser security as well as by content delivery networks like CloudFlare.

News Archives 2024 Q2

Archived News