Batch Job Scheduling

Q&A

When we receive multiple requests from customers, in a short period of time, asking for a solution to the same issue, it is time to write a blogpost about it.

Automatically Run New Bat or CMD files

The question asked was

I want WatchDirectory to detect new Batch Scripts, *.cmd or *.bat, in a directory and automatically run them. I tried the Automatically Run Bat Files task, but it wants me to enter the name of the bat file to run. How can I do this?

The answer:

Yes, you need the "Run Bat Files" task, you just need to create a "static" batch file that will run the newly detected bat or cmd file. A simple RunTheNewScript.bat like this will do:

@echo off
rem the variable %WD_FILE% has the complete path to the newly detected script
Call "%WD_FILE%"
rem delete the script after it has run? Remove the "REM" on the next line
REM DEL "%WD_FILE%"

It is probably best to also Setup a Filter so this new task will only run when it detects a CMD or BAT file, see the picture below.

This is a low cost alternative to products such as Camellia Batch Job Server. Obviously, as a specialized program, Camellia BJS offers more/other functionality, but if all you need is to run dynamically created batch scripts automatically, you can do it with WatchDirectory.

Do you want to help a little boy with Cancer?

(Auf Deutsch lesen)

My friend Vladimir is looking for help. The 5 year old son, little Andrej, of a close friend needs a very expensive operation to hopefully cure his brain cancer.

On his blog, Vladimir has the complete story about little Andrej and also a great offer: donate to Andrej's parents and get a free license of his software! Personally, I use Agenda At Once and Web Log Storming - Great Software!

But obviously, this is not about getting free software, it is about helping a little boy. If you have a few euros or dollars to spare, even the smallest amounts help!

Update and a Small Offer

Little Andrej's parents still need about €40,000.- (~$55,000 USD).

If you PayPal me on my personal account (gertrijs@planet.nl) any amount you wish, I will double the amount you send (up to the discount amount) and transfer it to Andrej's parents. In return you receive a 25% discount on our programs. Any amount is OK, but please be generous.

This offer is valid until the end of March April 2010.

Gert

He is in the hospital now, He and his parents still need help!
His parents sold their house to get Andrej to a hospital. When he returns, he needs medicines...

Some of my customers really surprise me, in a GOOD way.

I emailed one of my favorite customers, Lori:

"Hello Lori,

I know you are a good person.
Please see http://watchdirftp.blogspot.com/2010/02/do-you-want-to-help-little-boy-with.html
and http://www.datalandsoftware.com/blog/2010/02/28/please-help-little-andrew-and-get-a-free-license/"

I should have a couple of checks in by tomorrow or Saturday. I'll make sure and donate then. More than that though, I will add Andrej to my prayer list. My 9-year-old daughter and I have a prayer list every night. If you could hear her pray, it would warm your heart. Please know she and I will pray for Andrej.

A few days later she donated $100.

Another customer donated $40 and ordered 2 extra licenses without any discount, asking for the promised discount to go to Andrej.
(Thank you Charles).

Good people do exist in this world!

Yes, there are a lot of you who donated who I did not mention. THANKS!

Print PDF files Automatically - with Foxit Reader

Please note: the new task mentioned in this blog is now part of the just released version 4.6.2 of WatchDirectory.

WatchDirectory already has a task called Automatically Print PDF files. That task uses Acrobat Reader in the background to print the PDF.

We found a way to use the fantastic free Foxit Reader to print PDF's. Foxit Reader proves to be much faster and, more important, more reliable than Acrobat Reader.

This new "Print PDF" plugin will be included in the next release of WatchDirectory.

When you use this new task, you must tell it where Foxit Reader is installed and on which printer it should print the PDF's. This is the printer name as it shows on the Windows Control Panel printers applet. No typo's allowed.

Printing from a Windows Service

Please note that Windows maintains the list of printers separately for each login account. When you configure a "Print PDF" task to run as a Windows Service (on the How to Run panel), the task will run as user "LocalSystem". LocalSystem most likely doesn't have your printers installed so you must tell Windows to run this Service as another user (as "You").

• Inside the WatchDirectory Control Center select the menu
  "Tools -> Windows Services"
• Locate the WatchDirectory Service for your task. If you called the task "PrintMyPdf", the Windows Service is called "watchDirectory:PrintMyPdf"
• Open its settings (right-click -> Properties) and change the account information so it uses another user and password.

WatchDirectory 4.6.1 released

New in 4.6.1

• Fixed: Startup speed improvements on Windows-7 systems using (buggy) AHCI drivers from Intel.
• Fixed: When History wasn't set to "Maximal" in options, you could not view any history.

New in 4.6.0

• New: Previously, the QUIET Event always fired multiple times, every "quiet interval" after the last real event.
  Now you can tell WatchDirectory to fire QUIET only once. For example, the Email task will only send 1 notification when there is no activity in the monitored directory.
• Updated: When the Auto FTP plugin is just checking if the connection to the server is still "alive" it will not send error messages anymore.

Download and Install

Download the current version from the download page and install it "on top" of your current install. No need to uninstall your older (version 4) release first.

Like all 4.x releases, this is a free upgrade for our customers. If you own a WatchDirectory version 4 license, you can upgrade to the current release at no cost.

WatchFTP 2.2.6 released

New in this WatchFTP release:

• Tasks have a new window where you can set all kind of timing related things.
• Files bigger than 4GB would not download properly.
• You can now let WatchFTP rename the FTP file after it has been downloaded. For example, let WatchFTP add a ".downloaded" suffix to the filename. At the same time you can tell WatchFTP never to download files with these suffixes.
• 4 new Proxy methods, including SOCKS4 and SOCKS5.
• When WatchFTP has trouble downloading certain files (for example because they have an illegal filename), those files are automatically added to a "blacklist" and will not be downloaded again.
• The WF_FILE_E variable (Email and Batch file action) contained garbage when the file has no extension.
• A memory corruption is fixed, depending on your exact settings this may have caused your WF tasks to crash.

This release is a Free Upgrade for all our WatchFTP customers. Just install this new release "on top" of your current release to keep all settings and tasks.

Receive an Email when No Files are Created

This post will describe how you can configure WatchDirectory's Email Task to receive an email when a directory has no activity for some time.

The Problem

WatchDirectory and its Email Task are most often used to send email when new files are created or changed. To make it send an email when "nothing happened" might seem easy, just select the QUIET option on the Events page and WatchDirectory will "trigger" when no changes are detected.

If you only select "QUIET" as the event, you will soon find you also receive emails even if there is activity (new files) in the monitored directory. Why is this?

The issue is that "QUIET" needs other events to "compare against". When another event happens, for example "FILENEW" - a new file is created, WatchDirectory sets a timer for the QUIET event. If there is another event before the timer times out, the timer is reset again.

So, if you want to receive an email when nothing happened for some time, you must enable both the QUIET and the FILENEW events. Obviously, now you will also receive emails when new files are created.

No Email for New Files

Here is how you can configure WatchDirectory to prevent those emails for new files.

First, you must make sure the email body has some unique text to distinguish between emails for the QUIET event (nothing happened) and the emails for FILENEW (new files are detected). Enter something like this at the bottom of the message body:

%WD_CONFIG%-%WD_REASON%

The above are 2 Environment Variables you can use with the Email task. %WD_CONFIG% is replaced by the name of your task (for example "NotifyNoActivity") and %WD_REASON% is replaced by "what happened" (QUIET or FILENEW).

Filter Email

Close the settings of the task and select WatchDirectory's menu
"View -> Email -> Email Settings".
At the bottom of the window that opens click "Filter Email" and the window to the left will open.

On this window you can enter (partial) subjects and message body strings that will prevent WatchDirectory sending those emails. Every email, for all tasks you create that has the text "NotifyNoActivity-FILENEW" in its body, will not be sent.

Create a CSV of all WatchDirectory Events

Q&A

Thomas asked if it is possible to have an overview of all events (detected files) from all his tasks. The Task History Viewer only shows you information of one task, it is currently not possible to see detected file information for all tasks on one window.

WatchDirectory stores all event information (detected files) in an SQLite database. Each task has its own history database. This post shows how you can create a CSV (comma separated values) file from the history of all your tasks.

Download the Scripts

Download the example scripts and tools (~0.5MB) and extract them to C:\listEvents. Make sure the "tmp" subdirectory is also created. The scripts write temporary files to this directory.

Configure the Scripts

The download contains 2 scripts:

• listEvents.bat
  This script extracts the latest XXX events of all tasks
• listEventsByDate.bat
  This script extracts the events of the last XXX days of all tasks

Please inspect the first few lines of those scripts and change them to reflect where you unzipped the download and the location of WatchDirectory's task directory.

How the Scripts Work

Both scripts enumerate all config files in the task directory and write SQL statements to a temporary file to copy event information to a temporary SQLite database. Once all data is copied, it queries the new database and exports the information to a CSV file. Once complete they start Excel to open the CSV.

Use File Viking to resize your pictures

The current File Viking beta doesn't include an Action to resize pictures yet. However, if you configure the Run action, it is easy to write a script to call, for example, ImageMagick to resize pictures you drop on a File Viking basket.

The script can use environment variables so it knows which files were dropped on the basket. The variable %FV_FILE% contains the full path to the file dropped on a basket, %FV_FILE_B% contains the "title" of the file without its extension. Below is the example script.

rem Where did you install ImageMagick (www.imagemagick.org)
SET IMA=C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-6.5.8-Q16

rem Where should resized pictures be stored
SET OUTDIR=F:\Testing\Target

rem call convert, make pictures half their original size. As % is a special character in
rem batch scripts, we need to "double" them.
"%IMA%\Convert.exe" "%FV_FILE%" -resize 50%% "%OUTDIR%\%FV_FILE_B%_50percent.png"

rem call convert again, making pictures fit into a 200x200 rectangle while keeping the
rem correct aspect ratio.
"%IMA%\Convert.exe" "%FV_FILE%" -resize 200x200 "%OUTDIR%\%FV_FILE_B%_200x200.png"

And below you see 2 pictures showing how to configure the basket. First we add a Filter action (new in yesterday's beta) so only pictures are allowed for the piped Run action.

The Run action is configured to run a script called F:\testing\fv_resize.bat, this is the script shown above.

This is just a small example how you can create your own actions for File Viking. If you can imagine it, you can do it.

Parlez-Vous Français? - ¿Habla usted español?

I must admit, my French and Spanish is really bad.... That is why we hired Jacob (French) and Hans (Spanish) to do the French and Spanish translations of our programs. More important: French and Spanish Support!

Currently, WatchFTP is already available in Spanish. Jacob is busy with a French translation of WatchFTP, it should be ready early 2010.

Our new File Viking program will be translated to French and Spanish as well, "really soon now". When we release v1.0 (or really soon after)

For WatchDirectory, we will start French and Spanish "slowly". A first release will have Spanish and French helpfiles and support, a later release will also have a translated User Interface.

Contact Us

We also have a new website, very much under construction at the moment. Our "Contact Us" and "Buy Now" pages will be moving to this site soon.

All our email addresses will also move to @gdpsoftware.com, our old email addresses will redirect to the new domain so you should not have a problem with this change.

WatchDirectory on Windows Terminal Server

German language support recently did some "debugging" of WatchDirectory tasks on Terminal Server. Tasks set to run as a Windows Service didn't run properly...

He wrote a German language blogpost describing how WatchDirectory works with Windows Terminal Server. Basically, you need to make sure Terminal Server is in "Install Mode" (change user /install) when you install WatchDirectory. You already knew this, of course, it is the same for all programs you install on Terminal Server.

However, WatchDirectory and WatchFTP can also create Windows Services.... When you create (or change) a WatchDirectory/WatchFTP task so it will now run as a Windows Service (or change it from Service back to "normal") you must make sure Windows Terminal Server is running in "Install Mode", also don't forget to change back to "user mode" (change user /execute) when you're done.

More info from Microsoft is available here: Starting the installation on Terminal Server.

Just For Dummies.... (Guess that's me)

You know the book series XXX for Dummies?? (Networks for Dummies, Windows for Dummies...) I always thought it sounded quite stupid, but the books are a huge success. You know what? These books are not about Stupid, they are about Easy.

Easy does it

No, we didn't create File Viking for Dummies, but we did do something quite interesting: Programming made easy for everyone. And I feel like a dummy why I didn't think about it before... Thank you, Charles, for suggesting this. We really need your input. Charles showed us we are the dummies ;-)

Pipes

We added "Pipes" to the next File Viking beta (yes, I know, that term is far to technical). The simple idea is the output of one Action is the input of a follow-up action.

For example, the ZIP files action has a zip file as output. You can configure the Email files action as a follow-up, it doesn't email the files you drop on the File Viking basket but the output of "Zip" instead - The zip file is emailed.

I have been testing this pre- pre- pre- beta-3 a few days now and can only say: this is a huge improvement over previous versions.... Charles, we owe you, thanks again!

Wow! Next Beta, Next Week! Join us!

PS, more Programming for Dummies

Yes, we will make this "programming" even better in future "1.x" releases. For example filtering comes to mind (only do this branch of the tree of actions for *.txt files)

File Viking - beta 2

The beta for our new File Viking (Drag & Drop File Processor) started last week. The first bugs were found and quickly fixed.

For those who tried beta 1..... Did you find "Settings -> Options -> Move Baskets shortcut"?
For example, use CTRL+SHIFT+/ to "move them". See vikings dancing on your screen - press the shortcut to move those baskets out of the way (quickly press again and again to have some fun!)

New Beta Version

The new beta release adds ZIP support... Drag & drop files on an icon floating above your desktop and they are zipped to
D:\MyBackups\{yyyy}{mm}{dd}\{hour}{min}.zip.
Missing directories are automatically created. Yes, {yyyy} is replaced by 2009.

New: 64 Bit downloads are available.
New: When a basket is processing the files you've dropped on it, it will show you a progress indicator.
Fixed: Crash when repeatedly closing an empty "configure basket" window (Thank you for reporting, Dees).
Fixed: Tooltips on Windows XP (and probably other compatibility issues on XP and Win2000).

Do you want to help Beta Testing

Send me an email (support at fileviking dot com).

Graphics

Below are some mockups Nataly made for File Viking (click for a larger version). I wish I could link to her website, but I don't think she has one yet. Anyway, don't you agree even the mockups look great? Do we really need 64mln "True Color" pictures? Personally, I like this charcoal style. But sure, full color images will be added.

These are exciting days! Expect File Viking early 2010, we will add a lot more features for you before we release!!