I have been asked to pass a report that shows all the hours that I have opened a specific program in my Windows 10 since it was installed until today.
Is there any way to get a list or something similar with this information?
Replace the program shortcut with:
Batch program:
Open notepad.exe
Write:
#echo off
C:\Program files\your program path
for /f " delims==" %%i in (c:\windows\temp\counter.txt) do set /A temp_counter= %%i+1
echo %temp_counter% > c:\windows\temp\counter.txt
Save it as counter.bat
Replace program shortcut with path to counter.bat
To see clicks:
Open notepad.exe c:\windows\temp\counter.txt
Related
This forum post
https://cycling74.com/forums/topic/running-multiple-max-applications-on-the-same-machine/#post-369180
mentions using
open -n /Applications/"max 6.1"/Max.app
to run a second instance of, in this case, Max/MSP, but this is on a Mac. What's the equivalent of -n in Windows?
I also found an old forum post
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php/647714-How-can-you-open-multiple-instances-of-the-same-application-in-Windows
where one user suggests
...you could also create a cmd or bat file with content similar to
this:
"C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe" /n "%1" or
start "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe" /n "%1"
or call "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe" /n
"%1"
It will launch a new instance each time you click open with and select
the cmd/bat file.
but that didn't seem to work for me (it will open a first instance, but does nothing after that), quite possibly because that was for Windows XP, not 10.
I am trying to start the default application for a file, wait for it to complete, and then continue with my batch file. The problem is that start, when used below simply creates another command prompt window with the example.doc in the title bar. I can use call instead of start, but then call does not wait for the program to finish before going to the next line. It appears that start needs to have an executable name and will not work with the default application system in windows.
Any ideas how I can make this happen without having to hardcode the windows application in the batch file as well?
set filename=example.doc
start /wait %filename%
copy %filename% %filename%.bak
How do I start the default application for a file, wait for completion, then continue?
It appears that start needs to have an executable name and will not work with the default application system in windows.
start, when used below simply creates another command prompt window with the example.doc in the title bar
start /wait %filename%
The above command won't work because %filename% is used as the window title instead of a command to run.
Always include a TITLE this can be a simple string like "My Script" or just a pair of empty quotes ""
According to the Microsoft documentation, the title is optional, but depending on the other options chosen you can have problems if it is omitted.
Source start
Try the following command instead:
start "" /wait %filename%
Alternative solution using the default open command
Any ideas how I can make this happen without having to hardcode the
windows application in the batch file as well?
One way is to use assoc and ftype to get the default open command used for the file then execute that command.
The following batch file does that for you (so no hard coding of windows applications is needed).
Open.cmd:
#echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
set _file=example.doc
rem get the extension
for %%a in (%_file%) do (
set _ext=%%~xa
)
rem get the filetype associated with the extension
for /f "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%b in (`assoc %_ext%`) do (
set _assoc=%%b
)
rem get the open command used for files of type filetype
for /f "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%c in (`ftype %_assoc%`) do (
set _command=%%c
rem replace %1 in the open command with the filename
set _command=!_command:%%1=%_file%!
)
rem run the command and wait for it to finish.
start "" /wait %_command%
copy %_file% %_file%.bak 1>nul
endlocal
Further Reading
An A-Z Index of the Windows CMD command line - An excellent reference for all things Windows cmd line related.
assoc - Display or change the association between a file extension and a fileType
enabledelayedexpansion - Delayed Expansion will cause variables to be expanded at execution time rather than at parse time.
for - Conditionally perform a command several times.
for /f - Loop command against the results of another command.
ftype - Display or change the link between a FileType and an executable program.
start - Start a program, command or batch script (opens in a new window).
variable edit/replace - Edit and replace the characters assigned to a string variable.
Simply use the filename directly as command, unless that filename is a batch file, in which case use call.
In a batch file invocation of a GUI subsystem executable is blocking, unlike for an interactive command.
Use the start command when you don't want blocking execution.
There is a subtle point about “default application”, namely that a file type can have a registered default application for the graphical shell, e.g. its “Open with…”, without having an assoc/ftype association, or different from that association.
I'm not entirely sure of which registry entries are used for this. I've always had to look it up and research it each time. As I recall it's not well-documented.
But hopefully you're OK with just the assoc/ftype scheme.
A further subtle point about “default application”: on the laptop I'm writing this on the ftype association for text files is to open them in Notepad:
[H:\forums\so]
> assoc .txt
.txt=txtfile
[H:\forums\so]
> ftype txtfile
txtfile=%SystemRoot%\system32\NOTEPAD.EXE %1
[H:\forums\so]
> _
And this is what the graphical shell (Windows Explorer) will do.
But cmd.exe looks inside files, and if it finds an executable signature then it tries to run the text file as an executable, even in Windows 10:
[H:\forums\so]
> echo MZ bah! >oops.txt
[H:\forums\so]
> oops.txt
This version of H:\forums\so\oops.txt is not compatible with the version of Windows you're running. Check your computer's system information and then contact the software publisher.
[H:\forums\so]
> _
I'm trying to uninstall a program EXE via batch file and am not having any success.
The uninstall string found in the registry is as follows:
C:\PROGRA~1\Kofax\Capture\ACUnInst.exe /Workstation
C:\PROGRA~1\Kofax\Capture\UNWISE.EXE /U
C:\PROGRA~1\Kofax\Capture\INSTALL.LOG
If I run that from CMD or batch it does nothing.
If I run C:\PROGRA~1\Kofax\Capture\UNWISE.EXE /U from CMD it will open up a dialog box to point to the INSTALL.LOG file and then proceed to uninstall.
At the end, it will ask me to click finish.
I need this to be silent, can you point me in the right direction? This is on XP and 7.
Every program that properly installs itself according to Microsoft's guidelines makes a registry entry in either HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall (for machine installs) or HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall (for user profile installs). Usually, the key for the program will be its GUID, or else the name of the program. Within that key will be an entry called UninstallString. This contains the command to execute to uninstall the program.
If you already know ahead of time what you will be uninstalling, it should be easy enough to just put that in your batch file. It gets tricky when you try to automate that process though. You can use the reg command to get data from the registry, but it returns a lot of text around the actual value of a given key, making it hard to use. You may want to experiment with using VBscript or PowerShell, as they have better options for getting data from the registry into a variable.
This might help you further.....
How to Create a script via batch file that will uninstall a program if it was installed on windows 7 64-bit or 32-bit
I've had the same problem and this is what I came up with.
Before you start using this method though, you might wanna look up the name of the application on WMIC using CMD so..
First you wanna do: WMIC product > C:\Users\"currentuser"\Desktop\allapps.txt
I'd recommend to output the command to an TXT file because it's really confusing to read it in the Cmd prompt, plus is easier to find the data you are looking for.
Now what you wanna do is find the actual name of the app... If you look at the code I put in, the app name says SkypeT because skype has "™" in the end of it and the command prompt can't interpretate that as it is.
After you got the app name, just put in the find in the 4th line and substitute, a few lines which contain my examples with skype...
Also you can probably creat a variable called %APP% and not worry as much, but at it's current it works just fine...
One thing to note! with me the msi /quiet command did not work, the program would not install or uninstall so I used /passive, which lets the users see what's going on.
#Echo off
CD %cd%
:VerInstall
for /f "tokens=12,*" %%a in ('wmic product list system ^| Find /I "SkypeT"') do (
if Errorlevel = 0 (
Echo Skype is installed! )
if Errorlevel = 1 ( Echo Skype is not installed, proceding to the installation!
Ping localhost -n 7 >nul
goto :Reinstall )
)
:Status
tasklist /nh /fi "IMAGENAME eq "APP.exe" | find ":"> nul
if errorlevel = 1 goto :force
goto :Uninstall
:Force
echo We are killing the proccess... Please do not use the application during this process!
Ping localhost -n 7 > nul
taskkill /F /FI "STATUS eq RUNNING" /IM APP* /T
echo The task was killed with success! Uninstalling...
Ping localhost -n 7 > nul
:Uninstall
cls
for /f "tokens=12,*" %%a in ('wmic product list system ^| Find /I "SkypeT"') do (
set %%a=%%a: =%
msiexec.exe /x %%a /passive /norestart
)
:DoWhile
cls
Tasklist /fi "IMAGENAME eq msi*" /fi "STATUS eq RUNNING" | Find ":" >nul
if errorlevel = 1 (
echo Installation in progress
Goto :DoWhile
)
echo Skype is Uninstalled
:Reinstall
msiexec.exe /i SkypeSetup.msi /passive /norestart
:reinstallLoop
Tasklist /fi "IMAGENAME eq msi*" /fi "STATUS eq RUNNING" | Find ":" >nul
if errorlevel = 1 (
echo Installation in progress
goto :reinstallLoop
)
echo Skype is installed
:end
cls
color 0A
Echo Done!
exit
One last thing. I used this as an Invisible EXE task, so the user couldn't interact with the command prompt and eventually close the window (I know, I know, it makes the whole echoes stupid, but it was for testing purposes).for that I used BAT to EXE converter 2.3.1, you can put everything to work on the background and it will work very nicelly. if you want to show progress to users just write START Echo "info" and replace the info with whatever you want, it will open another prompt and show the info you need.
Remember, Wmic commands sometimes take up to 20 seconds to execute since it's querying the conputer's system, so it might look like it's doing nothing at first but it will run! ;)
Good luck :)
We needed a batch file to remove a program and we couldn't use programmatic access to the registry.
For us, we needed to remove a custom MSI with a unique name. This only works for installers that use msi or integrate such that their cached installer is placed in the Package_Cache folder. It also requires a unique, known name for the msi or exe. That said, it is useful for those cases.
dir/s/b/x "c:\programdata\packag~1\your-installer.msi" > removeIt.bat
set /p RemoveIt=< removeIt.bat
echo ^"%RemoveIt%^" /quiet /uninstall > removeIt.bat
removeIt.bat
This works by writing all paths for 'your-installer.msi' to the new file 'removeIt.bat'
It then assigns the first line of that bat file to the variable 'RemoveIt'
Next, it creates a new 'removeIt.bat' that contains the path/name of the .msi to remove along with the needed switches to do so.
Finally, it runs the batch file which executes the command to uninstall the msi. This could be done with an .exe as well.
You will probably want to place the 'removeIt.bat' file into a known writable location, for us that was the temp folder.
Is it possible to attach the windows debugger in VS2010 to a process from a batch file?
preferably by giving it a process name
Since you presumably already have the process running, you would use vsjitdebugger.exe /p 1234 where 1234 is the PID of the process you want to debug. If you don't know it, you would have to use some other method to figure it out.
If you have the debugging tools for windows available, the tlist.exe utility will yield the process ID for a process name. If that is available, then the following will attach to a given process:
rem Get the process ID
for /f %%f in ('tlist -p %1') do set mypid=%%f
rem attach to it with selected debugger
vsjitDebugger -p %mypid%
Edit If tlist is not available, I think tasklist will work. It's a bit uglier, but the following worked for me (you know ... it works my on my system :) Note too that I edited the command previous example to work in a cmd.exe prompt (I use tcc, which does require as many % signs).
rem Get the process ID
for /f "tokens=2 delims= " %%f in ('tasklist /nh /fi "imagename eq %1"' ) do set mypid=%%f
rem attach to it with selected debugger
vsjitDebugger -p %mypid%
Specifying a /Command switch on devenv.exe 's command-line will make it run a specified command on open. You could specify the Debug.AttachToProcess command. Don't know if you can specify a pid, though, when you execute that command.
When I open cmd on my laptop it is defaulting to the F: drive. This is troubling me does anyone know how it got that way or how to get it back to where it opens to the C: drive by default?
Use the command
C:
To change to the drive C. It would of course work for any drive letter.
Very minor nit: if you're using Windows 7 you don't need the cmdhere powertoy, it's built in to Explorer.
You just navigate to a directory in Windows Explorer then hold down the shift key and right click. "Open command window here" is one of the selections on the context menu.
When it comes to opening cmd.exe in a specific directory, I just create a shortcut to cmd.exe and then in the shortcut properties I set "Start in:" to the drive/directory I want it to start in.
Using a shortcut allows me to customize the cmd.exe windows depending on what I'm using it for. For normal file editing/viewing I use a 180x60 window and appropriate font, but when I want to read/search log files I have a shortcut that opens a 260x100 window with a smaller font. That way I can view most long log file lines without having to use the horizontal scroll.
http://blog.stevienova.com/2007/04/08/change-your-default-cmd-prompt-path/
Sometimes, your path when you go to start->run, CMD will be something
you don’t want. In active directory or on an NT domain, sometimes your
default home path might be a network drive. This isn’t so good when
you are offline or drop offline after being online. The CMD prompt is
set to a place where you can’t get to.
To change the path, you can edit the registry (at your own risk)
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftCommand Processor] “Autorun”=”c:”
This will change the path to your c: drive.
I believe it defaults to %HOMEDRIVE%\%HOMEPATH% so if you can muck about with those environment variables that might be an option. I can't edit these environment variables on my company's network, so I had to use the AutoRun to change it to something sane.
quick answer: cmd /k c:
long answer to make it "automagical":
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/autoruncmd.htm
In RegEdit.exe I created a String:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\AutoRun
The value I used for AutoRun was "D:"
On the start screen / menu, type in "cmd", right-click it and select "Open File - Location".
In the opened window, right-Click on "Command Prompt" icon, select "Properties", and edit the "Start In" property to your desired path. I used "C:\" as an example
If you are opening it from a shortcut change the working dir for the shortcut.
In addition to the other answers, there's a nice powertoy for XP called "open command window here." It adds an option to your right-click context menu when you click inside a folder to open a command window using that directory as the starting path.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/Downloads/powertoys/Xppowertoys.mspx
I ran into a similar issue where cmd would always open up in a particular directory (annoying when running scripts which invoke cmd). The best way to deal with this is to edit your autorun settings. Raymond Chen has a nice article about this here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/11/21/6447771.aspx
The summary is that when you start a command shell, it checks the autorun registry key, and executes the commands stored there. The registry keys it checks are:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\AutoRun
and/or
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\AutoRun
Some answers already mentioned AutoRun as a solution.
But that can be very dangerous, as the AutoRun entry will be executed for any new cmd.exe instance (only pipes ignore the AutoRun).
A simple expample that fails:
cd /d E:\myPath
FOR /F "delims=" %%Q in ('dir') do echo - %%Q
With AutoRun=C:, this shows the content of the current path of drive C:
You can still use AutoRun, but it should be a batch script, that checks if it was called interactive, by FOR/F or by drag&drop.
#echo off
REM *** To enable this script, call it by <scriptName> --install
setlocal EnableDelayedExpansion
REM *** ALWAYS make a copy of the complete CMDCMDLINE, else you destroy the original!!!
set "_ccl_=!cmdcmdline!"
REM *** The check is necessary to distinguish between a new cmd.exe instance for a user or for a "FOR /F" sub-command
if "!_ccl_:~1,-2!" == "!comspec!" (
REM ***** INTERACTIVE ****
REM *** %1 contains only data, when the script itself was called from the command line
if "%~1" NEQ "" (
goto :direct_call
)
endlocal
doskey /macrofile="%~dp0\cmdMacros.mac"
echo ********************************************************************
echo * AutoRun executed from "%~f0"
echo * Macros loaded from "%~dp0\cmdMacros.mac"
echo ********************************************************************
cd /d C:\myPath
) ELSE (
REM *** Called by a FOR command, by an explorer click or a drag & drop operation
REM *** Handle PROBLEMATIC Drag&Drop content, if necessary
endlocal
)
exit /b
:direct_call
if "%~1" == "--install" (
reg add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor" /v "AutoRun" /t REG_SZ /d "%~f0"
exit /b
)
if "%~1" == "--show" (
reg query "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor" /v AutoRun
exit /b
)
if "%~1" == "--remove" (
reg DELETE "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor" /v AutoRun /f
)
exit /b