Windows – Page 8 – Chris F Carroll

Sysinternals’ Autoruns for Windows (What’s this process / program?)

Sysinternals has been taken over by Microsoft which gives a nice reassuring hue to all their nifty tools. Autoruns for Windows is the one you want to find out about processes which start up from the registry or other automatic means.

Write to a text file from MS SQL Server

There are several things you need to know to be able to do this.

How to enable ad hoc queries.
This guy enable-Ad-Hoc-Distributed-Queries shows you how.
How to format the driver string and specify your directory and filename. Like this:
OpenRowset('MSDASQL', 'Driver={Microsoft Text Driver (*.txt; *.csv)};DefaultDir=c:\MyDirectoryName;','select * from MyTextFile.txt')
How to create a text file in the right format. This format works:
"ColumnName1","ColumnName2"
"value11", "value21"
"value21", "value22"

There. That was only slightly unreasonably difficult. Now you can

Select * from OpenRowset('MSDASQL', 'Driver={Microsoft Text Driver (*.txt; *.csv)}; DefaultDir=c:\MyDirectoryName;','select * from MyTextFile.txt')

and

Insert into OpenRowset('MSDASQL', 'Driver={Microsoft Text Driver (*.txt; *.csv)};
DefaultDir=c:\MyDirectoryName;','select * from MyTextFile.txt')
Values ('Col1', 'Col2')

Grep for Windows is FindStr

Grrr. Where's grep when you need it on a Windows box? No, you don't need cygwin. You just need:

findstr /?

And yes it does regular expressions. For example:

Echo "Here Is A Sentence" | Findstr /i "\<Sen[a-zA-Z]*e\>"
TaskList /v | findstr /i "Where[']sGrep.exe"

Restore files from an Apple Time Machine Backup to Windows

As noted in Reading a Mac OS X disk from Windows if you can plug your Mac OS X drive into your Windows computer then you can use HFS Explorer to read it.

This works fine for Apple Time Machine Backups: look for the directory called /Backups.backupdb/ and within that, the name of your computer. You'll find dated directories of your backups. If you're just after the most recent version of your files, then look for a directory called "Latest".

It's quite clever — the folder for a given date shows you not just files backed up on that date but everything that was on your original disk at that date. The magic of file system links.