Difference between batch files and BCP Commands???
As per my knowledge BCP(Bulk copy program) is used to load the data from flat files to database in a fast way and vice versa and batch files are used to copy the files from one location to other location, to create new directories..etc using MS-Dos commands.
Can i get exact difference between Batch files and BCP Commands??
Thanks
Venaikat
Batch files are to BCP as Java is to JavaScript
BCP is a command line tool
Batch files allow you to script command line tools, to make them perform their various functions in a repetitive and reproducible way, without needing keyboard or mouse interaction.
Batch files are a general purpose programming scripting language that is interpreted, and so is slower than a compiled language, but batch scripts are generally much faster to develop a program/script to perform a task. They also have limitations when compared to many compiled languages, with poison characters etc.
Related
I have many pdf files with same layout in which I need to fill in some details with plain text and sign in certain places with company stamp.
I am trying to automate things, so I am after a way to fill in the details + stamp the first file and then "copy-paste" that operation to all files.
I managed to find:
online websites allowing me to annotate one file at a time
documentation on how to use pdftk and additional tools to create a script, but it can take a lot of manual operations via command line (e.g. scaling the signature jpeg file, positioning it, adding text in right location etc.) which is very tedious.
Is there any way to annotate the first file using visual tools (like #1) and then extract a script of commands to perform these annotations from command line ?
I can then use that script on multiple files.
Thank you,
-Moshe
I recently recovered a 1.5TB external HDD that crashed. The program I used to recover the files was Active Undelete Enterprise, it's excellent. When the files were successfully recovered they were all saved with a .efs extension so files looked like mydocument.docx.efs. At first I thought they were encrypted and needed to be decrypted, I spent 10 mins on it and realized I just need to remove the .efs from the entire filename and the mydocument.docx works perfectly. Problem is now I have over 55,000 files within hundreds of folders where I need to simply remove the .efs after each file. Does anyone know how to do this?
From a command prompt window, navigate to the top level directory where these files reside.
Type the command
DIR /S/B >>filelist.txt
This command will give you a bare format file listing of the current directory plus all nested subdirectories without any extraneous information. The list will be contained in the text file named "filelist.txt" or whatever else you choose to call it. I would then use this text file in a text editor to convert every line of text from, for example,
C:\Users\dlucas\.gimp-2.8\mathmap\file1.png.efs
to
rename c:\Users\dlucas\.gimp-2.8\mathmap\file1.png.efs file1.png
to give a simple example of a file that I just found on my system using this method.
You will need to use a text editor with a columnar editing capability since you have to modify som many files. Old programmer's editors such as CodeWright made this really simple while modern editors such as Eclipse or Notepad++ make this a little more difficult and may require a columnar editing plugin, depending on version. You basically have to make a columnar copy of all of the text in the file, and then paste the copy off to the far right - far enough that a second column of filenames and paths won't overwrite any of the existing file names and paths. You can then use columnar editing features to select and delete the path names of the text in the 2nd column since the rename command requires that the 2nd argument be simply the base filename and extension without the path information. You can use the columnar editing features to prepend every line with "RENAME ". If you attempt to do this without columnar editing features, you will find it slow going!
An alternate way to do this is to use a command formed from a "regular expression" to create the rename command. If you are not familiar with "regular expressions", ask a programmer friend as this is not an easy topic to learn from scratch. If you are familiar with regular expressions, this is probably the simplest way to perform this task. I haven't used them in many years and no longer recall the exact syntax to use or I would tell you myself.
Regardless of what kind of editor you use, the goal is to turn this ASCII file list of paths and filenames into a batch file (simply rename file1.txt to file1.bat when you are finished editing). You can then run the batch file by typing file1.bat at a command prompt.
I have just run into this same problem myself using the same really wonderful tool that you used. I am writing this while waiting for the undelete program to finish. That it restores files with this extra extension seems very anti-intuitive so I will look for an option to make it not do this when it finishes. If I find one, I will post a new answer here that is more specific to this tool. Otherwise, I am going to have rename all kazillion files just as you had to.
You experienced this problem because the disk that you recovered your files to "does not support encryption", according to the Active# UNDELETE documentation. The documentation offers no further explanation of what kind of disks support encryption, etc.
They offer a Decrypt command that restores the file's proper names as a post processing step. Unfortunately, this requires that you "include" each and every file to be decrypted, with no support for wildcards and parsing subdirectories so that is a non-starter, in my opinion given that both of us have hundreds of thousands of files to be renamed.
I did find that by selecting a normal fixed (non-removable) hard drive as the destination of the recovery effort, that the resulting files do not end up encrypted (i.e., they are recovered with the proper file name and extension). I originally chose a large USB based flash drive and the files were stored in their "encrypted" state (not really encrypted, but possibly potentially so and thus they give the .efs extension). Of course, this meant that I had to run the command all over again after switching to a regular hard drive (takes about 16 hours to recover 80GB worth of files due to presence of many sector CRC errors).
I would like to create some batch scripts to move some files around. But i was wondering if there are any good resources on how to do this? Do you just use Command Line arguments?
At its simplest level, a batch script is a text file with a .bat extension, and consists of the same commands you would enter at the command line, separated by carriage returns.
Thus, the file:
md C:\HelloWorld
Is a batch script that attempts to create the directory "HelloWorld" on your C: root.
Batch scripts can be much more complex, involving variables and flow control logic, but before you travel that road, you may want to investigate powershell and WSH.
Edit Oops... fixed the link to powershell.
Basically, you just do command-line argument. But there are certain types of variables supported, and also command-line arguments to the batch file, which you can use.
http://www.computerhope.com/batch.htm
I am doing some sort of science with a combination of Python, bash scripts and configuration files with weird syntaxes from old C programs. To run different tests, I have to tune (open text file, edit and save) a number of these files, but it is getting harder and harder to remember which files to edit. Also, the tasks are very repetitive and I end having a bunch of comment lines, switching on and off the settings for a specific run.
I dream of a tool that can keep a list of files (regardless of the file format) and allow me to centrally choose from a predefined list of "profiles", taking care of editing the script/config files. For example lets say I have a config and script file:
config.cfg
var1 = 1.0
#var1 = 1.5
script.sct
function(200.0)
#function(300.0)
I would like to instead have auxiliary text files:
config.cfg.tem
var1 = $$var1$$
script.sct.tem
function($$par1$$)
and in a central script or even better, a GUI, just switch from profile1 (e.g. var1=1.0,par1=200.0) to profile2 (e.g. var1=1.5,par1=300.0), and the tool to automatically update the text files.
Any idea if such a tools exists?
There are many, many processors which do this. Looking for a "templating system" will yield tons of elaborate tools.
OTOH, a very straight forward and simple way would be to use the C preprocessor. Define a settings include file were you #define your settings and then automatically include it when you process your templates.
$ cpp -include definitions_file input_template output_file
This is simple and has its shortcomings but works often good enough.
I'm confused by the concept of scripts.
Can I say that makefile is a kind of script?
Are there scripts written in C or Java?
I'd refer to Wikipedia for a detailed explanation.
"Scripts" usually refer to a piece of code or set of instructions that run in the context of another program. They usually aren't a standalone executable piece of software.
Makefiles are a script that is run by "make", or MSBuild, etc.
C needs to be compiled into an executable or a library, so programs written in (standard) C would typically not be considered scripts. (There are exceptions, but this isn't the normal way of working with C.)
Java (and especially .net) is a bit different. A typical java program is compiled and run as an executable, but this is a grey area. It is possible to do runtime compilation of a "script" written in java and execute it.
In a very general sense the term "Scripts" relates to code that is deployed and expected to run from the lexical representation. As soon as you compile the code and distribute the resulting output instead of the code it ceases to be a "Script".
Minification and obsfication of a script is not consided a compile and the result is still consider a script.
It depends on your definition of script. For me, a script could be any small program you write for a small purpose. They are usually written in interpreted languages. However, there's nothing stopping you from writing a small program in a compiled language.
For me a script has to consist of a single file. And that file must be able to perform the task for which the script was written with no intermediate steps.
So these would be OK:
bash backup_my_home_dir.sh
perl munge_some_text.pl
python download_url.py
But this wouldn't qualify, even if the file is small:
javac HandyUtility.java
java HandyUtility
Yes it's possible to do scripting in Java. I've seen it many times :)
(this was sarcasm for bad spaghetti code)
The term 'scripting' can cover a fairly broad spectrum of activities. Examples being programming in imperative interpreted languages such as VBScript, Python, or shell scripts such as csh or bash, or expressing a task in declaritive languages such as XSL, SQL or Erlang.
Some scripting languages fall into a category referred to as Domain Specific Languages (DSL's). Good examples of DSL's are 'makefile's, many other types of configuration files, SQL, XSL and so on.
What you're asking is fairly subjective, one man's script is another man's application. If your interpretation of scripting means that using scripting languages should not force a user to follow the traditional compile -> link -> run cycle, then you could form the opinion that you can't write 'scripts' in C or Java.
A script is basically a non-compilable text file in almost any language, or shell, with an interpreter that is used to automate some process, or list of commands, that you perform repeatedly. Scripts are often used for backing up files, compiling routines, svn commits, shell initialization, etc., ad infinitum. There are a million and one things you can do with a script that an executable (complete with installation, etc.) would simply be overkill for.
I write scripts in F#. A recent one is a small data loader to take in some set of data, do a bit of processing to it, and dump it in a DB. ~40 lines. No separate compilation step needed; I can just make F# Interactive run it directly.
Benefit is that I get a fully powered language with a great IDE and all the safety static checking provides, while inference makes it not get verbose like say, Java or C#.
So, that's one language that offers a reasonably decent type system, compilation and checking, isn't interpreteded, but works fine for scripting.