Jon Schneider's Windows Utilities

On this page are utilities for Windows that I've developed as tools to assist myself in performing various tasks. I've posted them here in the hopes that others might find them useful as well!



  Bounds Test

This utility is useful to roughly gauge the size and position of items on the screen, like a simple on-screen ruler. The program's window background is partially transparent; by resizing it to fit over an item on the screen, an approximation of the item's size and position in pixels (corresponding to the program window's own size and position) is displayed.

The utility also shows information on the bounds of the screen, corresponding to the WorkingArea property of the .NET Framework's System.Windows.Forms.Screen class. These properties will update as the utility is dragged between different monitors in a system with multiple monitors.

The application window can be resized by dragging any corner or edge, and repositioned by dragging anywhere on the window other than the edges.

Tic marks are shown every 25 pixels from the top and left edges of the window. Larger tic marks are shown every 100 pixels.

Download BoundsTest 2.1.2 (16k)
(Last updated April 26, 2011)


BoundsTest.exe screen capture


vdf ("Virtual Directory Find")

This command-line utility returns the physical path that corresponds to a specified IIS virtual directory. It's essentially a shortcut for opening up the inetmgr utility and looking up the physical path for the virtual directory there. The utility supports an optional -c switch that will copy the physical path found to the clipboard for easy navigation to the physical directory with a subsequent "cd" command.

Download vdf 1.0.3 (4k)
(Last updated February 11, 2006)


vdf.exe screen capture


PathFind

Pathfind is a command-line utility which returns the locations in which a specified file is present on the current path (based on the value of the PATH environment variable). It's useful to find out the location from which a particular command-line application or file is run. If the filename to find is specified with no extension (for example, "iisreset"), then the file extensions from the PATHEXT environment variable (typically including .com, .exe., .bat, .cmd) are automatically searched (in addition to searching for the file with no extension).

New in version 2.0 is support for * and ? wildcard characters, which function the same way that they do in other cmd.exe utilities.

Notes: The functionality of this utility is similar to that of the which command for Unix/Linux. Also, a similar utility for Windows, where.exe, is included with newer Windows verions (including Windows 7); the functionality of PathFind is similar to that of where.exe, but PathFind's output is formatted more nicely, and only PathFind supports PATHEXT file extension searching.

Download pathfind 2.0.1 (6k)
(Last updated July 18, 2011)


pathfind.exe screen capture


ccc ("Clipboard Character Count")

ccc is a simple command-line utility that returns the number of text characters currently stored on the Windows clipboard. (The returned value includes control characters such as newlines.)

An optional -all switch is supported to have the utility return the length of all forms of text from the System.Windows.Forms.TextDataFormat enum instead of just returning the count of plain text characters.

New in version 1.0.2: ccc now looks for HTML table data present on the clipboard (i.e. content copied to the clipboard from a table on a web page); if present, ccc additionally reports the number of rows present in the copied portion of the table, based on the count of <tr> tags present in the copied data. This is a slightly faster way to get a count of the number of rows in an HTML table than pasting the content into a fresh Excel sheet and looking at the row number of the bottom row of data.

Download ccc 1.0.2 (4k)
(Last updated April 26, 2011)



ccc.exe screen capture

crel ("Clipboard Remove Empty Lines")

crel is a simple command-line utility that removes empty/blank lines in text data currently stored on the Windows clipboard.

Download crel 1.0.0 (4k)
(Last updated September 11, 2015)



crel.exe screen capture

Questions/Comments? Email me at: jon dot schneider at gmail dot com

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