Programming Question
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Who (apart from my good self) still writes .bat files? Are they common or am I one of the old fogies that still employs his DOS knowledge?
--------------------------------- I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] English League Tables - Live
I still write .bat files. I do alot of command line FTP crap and batch files are just the thing :)
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Ever drop one of those decks and screw up the jcl sequences. I did, not fun. thankfully they were numbered and I was able to reassemble it using an old mechanical sorter. Any body remember those ? Wrote and used a .bat file the other day to clean up a bunch of MSIlog files 20K worth (thank you microsoft).
LOL We used punch cards on an IBM mainframe when I was in college(MANY moons ago). I had a 500 line Assembly program and dropped the deck. Took me hours to get all the cards back in order. It wasn't funny then but it is now. :laugh:
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Who (apart from my good self) still writes .bat files? Are they common or am I one of the old fogies that still employs his DOS knowledge?
--------------------------------- I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] English League Tables - Live
I still use .bat files. Sometimes a small batch file on ur desktop is the most elegant solution to simplify things. I know there are better techniques around now that PowerShell is there. But since my requirements are simple, i stick to my old DOS knowledge :)
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Yes Pete, but alas you are venerable and aged, like me. I bet them young whippersnappers don't!
--------------------------------- I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] English League Tables - Live
I also am a whipper snapper and I still use bat files. Why write a full blown application when all you want to do is chain a couple of pre-existing applications? Of course, not everyone thinks like that. It depends on whether you're good at building a big picture out of small parts or whether you can only see the big picture. On my machine at present I have one bat files that is run twice a week to remove old files from my downloads and temp directories. Means I can drop stuff there and forget about it. I only delete files that are older than a week, though, hence the need for batch. I've also just used batch to put together a script to fire on check-in on cruise control to minify some javascript libraries for me. Could've used a whole new application, but why bother?
Er, I can't think of a funny signature right now. How about a good fart to break the silence?
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Gee, I never poked a hole in a card, :-D I sat at a massive mixture of devices and desk top with a keyboard. I poked a key, the device made a crunching sound, the card slightly moved and I either repeated or poked something else to release the card punched full of holes, which was pushed into a stack of cards. At the University, I also sat at something the size of the old typewriters that spat out a ribbon of paper. Usually over 10 feet long, imagine the swearing when the ribbon ripped. I can't remember how long the boot tape was, it took about 5 minutes to load in the machine.
Yes, I still occasionally use .BAT files. I no longer poke holes in cards or tape, though. I started with tape; we didn't have a "machine" but we did have a small hand-held bit of metal with some holes in it. You put the tape on it, screwed down a retaining bar and then took a "poker" and pushed it through guide holes in the retaining bar to make the holes in the tape. Then we "moved up" to cards, and had a mechanical hand-held device with an array of 12 "keys" that you had to push (rather hard as I recall, and having memorised the hole positions relating to the different letters/numbers/characters) to punch out the holes in the card. The machine automatically then moved the card one position along. What a treat to move from those devices to a teletype with a card-punch/reader, and then at college to use the electric card punch machines, which had an actual keyboard... :-) OTOH, my first full-time employer had a "punch room" full of "young ladies" doing the punching, from our hand-written coding sheets. Always a treat to take a program down to the punch room or collect a deck... :cool:
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Who (apart from my good self) still writes .bat files? Are they common or am I one of the old fogies that still employs his DOS knowledge?
--------------------------------- I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] English League Tables - Live
Way back in school I used punch cards and paper tape. More recently programmed in lots of old antiquated languages (Fortran, Bliss, Ada, various assembly, several others I don't list on my resume any more...) Scipted in VMS DCL, and now DOS batch. Mostly build stuff, or runing the app that I programmed. DOS is a newcomer y'know...
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Who (apart from my good self) still writes .bat files? Are they common or am I one of the old fogies that still employs his DOS knowledge?
--------------------------------- I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] English League Tables - Live
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Who (apart from my good self) still writes .bat files? Are they common or am I one of the old fogies that still employs his DOS knowledge?
--------------------------------- I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] English League Tables - Live
Yes, I still write .bat files. Old fogie, perhaps, but whatever gets the job done, I say. BTW, someone mentioned PowerShell. Is it worth learning? I wrote lots of shell scripts when I worked on Unix systems and it would be nice to have a Windows equivalent.
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Who (apart from my good self) still writes .bat files? Are they common or am I one of the old fogies that still employs his DOS knowledge?
--------------------------------- I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] English League Tables - Live
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LOL We used punch cards on an IBM mainframe when I was in college(MANY moons ago). I had a 500 line Assembly program and dropped the deck. Took me hours to get all the cards back in order. It wasn't funny then but it is now. :laugh:
In the late 70's and early '80s, CompSci students (me) at the University of Texas at Austin still submitted programs on card decks to the CDC Cyber. We reused general routines (stack, queue, io) by adding cards onto the end of the deck (they were too cheap with space to let us store the code as linkable libraries). Each of those "chunks" was color coded (with a Sharpie) on the top so we could tell them apart. Since we used Pascal, there were no line numbers that the mechanical sorter could use to put them in order, so when the operator dropped them we were SOL. So we learned to draw a diagonal line across the top of the deck to help visually sort them. I still write bat files because: they can be maintained by non-developers, you can't lose the source if changes need to be made, and everyone knows how to invoke a batch file (there are still many people who don't know how to invoke a .vbs script).
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Yes, I still occasionally use .BAT files. I no longer poke holes in cards or tape, though. I started with tape; we didn't have a "machine" but we did have a small hand-held bit of metal with some holes in it. You put the tape on it, screwed down a retaining bar and then took a "poker" and pushed it through guide holes in the retaining bar to make the holes in the tape. Then we "moved up" to cards, and had a mechanical hand-held device with an array of 12 "keys" that you had to push (rather hard as I recall, and having memorised the hole positions relating to the different letters/numbers/characters) to punch out the holes in the card. The machine automatically then moved the card one position along. What a treat to move from those devices to a teletype with a card-punch/reader, and then at college to use the electric card punch machines, which had an actual keyboard... :-) OTOH, my first full-time employer had a "punch room" full of "young ladies" doing the punching, from our hand-written coding sheets. Always a treat to take a program down to the punch room or collect a deck... :cool:
Boy, you sure beat me out on old tales to tell. Except my first employer's "punch room", had, as I recall "middle-aged" ladies in it. Since your punch tech is older than mine, maybe we had the same ladies? :) (I don't mean "had" in the porn sense and the lead didn't like me talking to anyone in the room including her.)
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LOL We used punch cards on an IBM mainframe when I was in college(MANY moons ago). I had a 500 line Assembly program and dropped the deck. Took me hours to get all the cards back in order. It wasn't funny then but it is now. :laugh:
funniest was when my co-operator did not properly load a tape. Spun the damn thing off of the deck. Was laughing like hell as it rolled out the door and down the hall.
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funniest was when my co-operator did not properly load a tape. Spun the damn thing off of the deck. Was laughing like hell as it rolled out the door and down the hall.
LOL That's good one.
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It's a shame Henry isn't here He could tell us of his days poking holes in cards!
--------------------------------- I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] English League Tables - Live
Hey you ain't lived until you dropped a box of 5000 punch cards, Oh and that was so advanced compared to having to load the bootstrap loader by hand via toggle switches. Hey the good news was there were only 15 instructions to know exactly to the the computer to boot from paper tape!
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Who (apart from my good self) still writes .bat files? Are they common or am I one of the old fogies that still employs his DOS knowledge?
--------------------------------- I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] English League Tables - Live
I use them to reduce hassle, such as copying files without having to run Windows Explorer or for setting up a virtual drive... I use the xTree Pro replacement below to search thousands of files (C++ or AS3) for a text string by using a batch file to set up the virtual drive with one command: subst Z: c:\pathToSubDirectory and I then I run ztreewin to log ALL the files on Z with a ".cpp" or ".AS" extention. I just searched 5800 C++ files in 50sec. John www.ztree.com/html/ztreewin.htm http://www.ztree.com/html/ztreewin.htm
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Who (apart from my good self) still writes .bat files? Are they common or am I one of the old fogies that still employs his DOS knowledge?
--------------------------------- I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] English League Tables - Live
Just came across this old post. I have to say, there are a few things for which you cannot do without DOS. For example "xcopy /s/e/d/y/c" or "xcopy /s/e/d/y/c/l" I use this for backup as well as synchronizing folders and several other things that just can't be done or at least done efficiently in Windows Explorer. Another one is my p.bat (pings several servers to tell me how the network is doing) and t.bat which does the same thing with traceroute. Cheers!