Shell Tips !

If you are an addict of the command line interface whateve the OS you use, you probably already had difficulties to administrate some Windows XP box remotely. Tips ! Get the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit tools on microsoft.com you could install lot of usefull tools and especially tail !

# display help

tail /?

# display last ten lines of a file

tail FILENAME

# display last thirty lines of a file

tail -30 FILENAME

# keep accessing file, displaying new lines as necessary.

tail -f FILENAME

System Requirements

On some computer that I have to manage remotly I can have some windows upgrade done. But in some case (new software install, or windows update to SP2) the windows firewall is automatically started and you can lost some software access (example : VNC). In my case, the firewalling is managed by another computer (A linux one) on the network and we need for some of our software to have full access to the network without the risk of a windows alert popup. So, I put a small batch file in the Start-up directory with the following line :

NETSH FIREWALL SET OPMODE DISABLE

Now, I’m sure that the firewall will never restart at the boot of the computer. Of course, this configuration require a firewall somewhere on your network between your computer and the internet, don’t forget this or you probably regret it one day.

In my professionnal experience I have to manage many PC running with Windows XP. Those box are used for broadcasting some video flow and download lot of media files which aren’t managed by our software. Naturally, I had to find a solution for dynamically purge the lot of useless media files daily generated. As everyone working in system administration (I suppose…), I didn’t have lot of time for doing this job and our software developper couldn’t add the possibility to destroy old files (still due to lot of projects and short timeline…), so I decide to use the Windows schedule (AT) and doing a batch file.

As we had different software version - and for a maximum flexibility in case of any “kidding” evolution of this software - I take care to use arguments to my script. Here by I’ll describe all the process of this script that can be resume in five parts :

1. Get and check our arguments
2. Checking some dates (OS date format, maximum vailidity date)
3. Parsing the directory to purge and get last access date of files
4. Testing date and delete useless files
5. Scheduling the batch file

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