logic involved » windows

Free, Portable FTP Server for Windows

niels — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:52:17 +0000

If you are looking for a really simple, free and portable ftp server for Windows, then visit StahlWorks.com and get their excellent Swiss File Knife. It’s a single, small executable with no dependencies that brings a ton of features. If you have it, just run …

sfk ftpserv -rw

… and enjoy your zero-install, ultra-portable ftp server!

Extracting .MSI Files

niels — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:11:30 +0000

Mercurial is a really nice revision control tool, but unfortunately there are no portable binary packages for Windows. They do offer msi packages, though. But retrieving their content without actually installing the software is a bit tricky.
You can just unpack them using 7-zip, but you are likely to get garbage.
Using your favorite search engine, you will find suggestions to perform an administrative installation using msiexec /a. Well, don’t. That’s just a normal installation, but without the GUI of the installer being shown.

Fortunately, there is lessmsi. It allows to open, inspect and extract Windows Installer packages.
For TortoiseHG, download the binary .msi package from the Mercurial homepage. Run lessmsi, open the .msi package and select “extract”. Mercurial will be extracted to WheretherYouExtracted\SourceDir\PFiles\TortoiseHg, and the original folder layout of Mercurial will be preserved.

Lessmsi is provided under the MIT License and does not require installation. Just download, unzip and run it.

Piping text to the clipboard in Vista and Windows 7

niels — Mon, 31 May 2010 12:39:24 +0000

Microsoft added a new command line tool to Vista and Windows 7: clip.exe. This nifty little utility allows user to copy program output to the clipboard on the windows command line. Its usage is pretty straightforward:

dir | clip – copies the output of the dir command to the clipboard
clip < example.txt – copy the contents of the file example.txt to the clipboard

Fighting Windows Sockets Legacy Troubles

niels — Fri, 14 May 2010 19:00:31 +0000

I came across a really annoying problem while using win32 sockets one of my bigger projects. In short, the VisualC compiler complained about redefinitions of basic Windows socket macros:

C:\sdk\windows\v6.0a\include\ws2def.h(91) : warning C4005: 'AF_IPX' : macro redefinition
C:\sdk\windows\v6.0a\include\winsock.h(460) : see previous definition of 'AF_IPX'
C:\sdk\windows\v6.0a\include\ws2def.h(124) : warning C4005: 'AF_MAX' : macro redefinition
C:\sdk\windows\v6.0a\include\winsock.h(479) : see previous definition of 'AF_MAX'
C:\sdk\windows\v6.0a\include\ws2def.h(163) : warning C4005: 'SO_DONTLINGER' : macro redefinition
C:\sdk\windows\v6.0a\include\winsock.h(402) : see previous definition of 'SO_DONTLINGER'
C:\sdk\windows\v6.0a\include\ws2def.h(206) : error C2011: 'sockaddr' : 'struct' type redefinition
C:\sdk\windows\v6.0a\include\winsock.h(485) : see declaration of 'sockaddr'
C:\sdk\windows\v6.0a\include\ws2def.h(384) : error C2143: syntax error : missing '}' before 'constant'
C:\sdk\windows\v6.0a\include\ws2def.h(384) : error C2143: syntax error : missing ';' before 'constant'
C:\sdk\windows\v6.0a\include\ws2def.h(384) : error C2059: syntax error : 'constant'
C:\sdk\windows\v6.0a\include\ws2def.h(437) : error C2143: syntax error : missing ';' before '}
(...)

After some digging in the code I noticed that windows.h had been included before winsock2.h. And that windows.h includes winsock.h. When digging deeper, I found an article in the MSDN describing what had happened here:
actually, this is a legacy problem. In Windows versions <= Windows 98, WinSock 1.1 had been used. The current win32 socket implementation, Windows Sockets 2 (WinSock 2.0), is backwards compatible to Windows Sockets 1.1. Additionally, the winsock2.h header files prevents the inclusion of the legacy winsock.h header file. But once you include winsock.h, you can not include winsock2.h later on.
Unfortunately, windows.h still includes winsock.h.
Fortunately, you can disable the legacy parts of the Windows SDK easily:

#define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN

You will not be able to build Windows 95/Windows 98 applications when using this definition. But if you were targeting those OS versions, you wouldn’t be using Windows Sockets 2 anyway.

View and Kill Processes using the Windows Command Line

niels — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:49:59 +0000

It’s pretty convenient to list and kill processes using ps and kill / pkill on *nix. Actually, you can do that on a Windows command line as well:

tasklist: shows a list of all running processes
taskkill: kills processes

Among other options, processes can be killed by their process ID (taskkill /PID 4711) and by the name of their executable (taskkill /IM firefox.exe).
So, if you have perl scripts running wild, just execute taskkill perl.exe to kill all of them down with a single command.

More lesser known Windows commands are described in this PDF.

Opening ISO Images in Windows

niels — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 08:41:34 +0000

Some tools just keep amazing me. They are flexible, stable, small – basically, they just work. One of these tools is 7-Zip.
It does a lot more than just creating 7zip archives: it is able to create and open almost any package type I’ve run across so far. And it even reads .iso image files.
Thanks a lot for this marvelous tool – it’s a joy to use and a definitive must-have!

How Internet Explorer 8 got hacked at Pwn2Own

niels — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:17:53 +0000

The Security Intel Analysis Team gives a pretty good summary of how the IE8 on Windows 7 got busted at the Pwn2Own during CanSecWest 2010. They show us a pretty interesting dive into the ideas behind data execution prevention in definitive must-read article.

Update:
zdnet provides (less verbose) background information on how the iPhone got hacked at the same event.

Using gdb on Windows

niels — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:56:33 +0000

If you want to use the GNU Debugger on Windows, say for Code::Blocks or Eclipse CDT, you have two options: Cygwin and MinGW. Cygwin is pretty easy to install, but uses Unix paths internally. This makes it a pain to set up. MinGW uses Windows paths, but there is no fancy setup.exe. Okay, there is an installer, but I did not find a way to install gdb. You can install MinGW components package by package, but I ended up with gdb crashing due to “Missing libexpat-1.dll”.
Fortunately, there is another installer for MinGW, and this one brings everything you need, even gdb: TDM’s GCC/MinGW32 Builds. And this one is working fine for me.

Using WinMerge with git on Windows 7

niels — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:03:56 +0000

Though git is not my primary source code management tool, I use it whenever I work on complex code that I don’t want to commit yet. Or just to keep track of my local scripts.
And using “git difftool”, it is pretty simple to use third party tools like WinMerge for graphical diffs:

Create a wrapper script (e.g. git-diff-wrapper.sh) and put it anywhere in your Windows path (%PATH%):
#!/bin/sh "C:/Program Files/WinMerge/WinMergeU.exe" -e -ub "$1" "$2" | cat
Update your .gitconfig to run this script whenever “git difftool” is invoked:
# … more config … [diff] tool = winmerge [difftool "winmerge"] cmd = git-diff-wrapper.sh "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE" # … more config …

That’s it, no restart required

How to Create MD5 Checksums On Windows

niels — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:13:09 +0000

There are many md5 utilities for Windows, but very few that …

are free/open source,
create checksums for multiple files,
export checksums to a file,
and verify md5 sums from a list of files.

In short: if you need a very good tool, then use the Swiss File Knife (sfk).

For creating checksums for all your files in the current directory and storing the individual checksums in checksum.md5, execute this:

sfk md5gento checksum.md5 .

And for validating the checksums of all files in the current directory, execute this:

sfk md5check checksum.md5

That’s it