24 May, 2010

WindowsXp Search Command Line

I've recently needed to search a suite of Windows Xp machines in search of files with particular extensions. Since I intended on piping the results to a text file for review Windows Explorer wouldn't suit my needs. The 'find' command wasn't the proper tool for the job either as it is used for finding text strings in files.

I found good-ole 'dir' was the man for the job.


c:\ dir c:\ *.exe /s


This command will recursively search from C: for files matching '*.exe'.

That'll do donkey, that'll do.

06 May, 2010

Installing WindowMaker on Debian

Real short, but it took me a bit of searching to find how to replace Gnome as my window manager.

Start by installing the WindowMaker package:

# apt-get install wmaker


Next, as the user that you wish to run WindowMaker as the window manager:

$ echo "exec wmaker" >> ~/.xsession
$ echo "exec wmaker" >> ~/.xinitrc


Log off, then back on for it to take effect.

Cheers.

05 May, 2010

Querying WinXp Process Information

Deep down I've always been a Unix guy. I've grown to love the types of utilities and applications authored for Unix-like systems. Generally, they adopt flexibility that many UI-based operating environments lack. Case in point, the batch command syntax is far superior to any Windoze has or likely will offer and as a result I often struggle to find similar features available when I am working in Windows. I recently learned something I felt was worth sharing.

The 'top' utility offers just about all you would require in monitoring your system performance. While task manager in Windows offers similar information I'd never found a means to pipe the output to a file for parsing and analysis. Today I found such a mechanism.

The 'wmic' utility available on multiple forms of Windows stands for 'Windows Management Instrumentation Command' and can offer similar information (and in some cases more info) than the equivalent use of 'top'. While you can initiate queries beyond processes I'm interested in process and memory utilization at this time.

Initiating the command:

wmic process get WorkingSetSize,Caption /format:csv >> c:\resources.log

Will query the memory utilization and name of all the processes currently running on the system, format into a comma-separated vector and append to the specified file. Wrap this fella in a loop, place in your start-up folder and you've got the makings of monitoring your system through initialization.

Boo-yah.