Utility Programs
All those years of programming must have amounted to something, right? This is a small
sample of things I have written over the years. It isn't all of it. Honestly.
These are some utility programs that some might find useful. They are simple, and their
use should be easily understood from the descriptions.
When you download one, change its extension from ".bin" to ".exe".
I had to rename them to avoid download problems.
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QuickOpen
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A Win32® command line utility that will
open a Windows® Explorer window on a
folder path. You can accomplish the same thing by running explorer.exe, but
its syntax is obtuse and difficult to remember. Type "qopen -?" (without the
quotes) for usage information.
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TinyClock
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A small digital clock the mimics the appearance of the one displayed by
default in the Windows tool tray. It has no options, yet, but it does
have at least one bug. Changing the system date and time display format doesn't
resize the TinyClock's display. Right-click on TinyClock's window to see the menu.
Check back from time to time for enhancements.
2001.10.14 v1.1.3 - Minor update to allow saving of current settings when program
is closed by Windows shutting down.
2002.03.08 v1.1.4 - Minor update to window style that prevents it from appearing in
the taskbar.
2002.08.30 v1.1.5 - Cleaned up the way TC repaints itself. It still doesn't resize
properly when the system display format is changed (I'm going to have to make it smarter
about estimating the correct size for a given format to fix that) but it no longer
causes the desktop to repaint whenever it starts. I also compiled it w/ VS .NET and it got
a lot smaller.
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Recycle
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Another command-line utility that deletes files to the Recycle Bin, unlike Microsoft's DEL,
which removes them from the file system, irretrievable without heroic efforts.
The syntax is patterned after that of JP Software's
4NT DEL command, so may be
a bit richer than the native DOS version. (Wouldn't you know it; JP Software has added
a switch to the DEL command in version 4.x of 4NT to offer this functionality, making
Recycle superfluous for me. Anyone using the native Windows command line can still get
use out of it, though.) Type "rcl -?" (without the quotes) on the command line to see its syntax.
2002.02.09 - Minor update to avoid confirmation dialogs under newer (>=5.00) versions
of shellapi.dll.