Tag: Windows

I was installing a piece of software recently that needed access to the Windows Administrator account–it essentially would not work with my regular local account that has admin access. Makes no sense, but that’s Windows.

The Administrator account is apparently disabled quite often on local installations of Windows, so the account needs to be reactivated and configured with a password.

The account can be reactivated from the command prompt or PowerShell with:

$ net user administrator /active:yes

Once reactivated, a password can be set for the account with:

$ net user administrator PASSWORD

Recently, I needed to generate a large number of empty text files for a project and looked for the best way to automate this.

I’m certain there are numerous ways to accomplish this, but I found a quick Windows command line method of doing so.

First, create a text file that has the filename and extension for the files. In my case, I needed to make a file for each day of a specific year in the past, so I created a files.txt file that looked something like this:

2008-01-01.md
2008-01-02.md
2008-01-03.md

I saved that in a folder on my laptop’s C: drive, then navigated to that folder from the Windows command line.

From there, the following command will read the files.txt file and create a new file for each line in that directory:

for /f "delims=" %F in (files.txt) do copy nul "%F"

From there, I was able to move the files to the application directory where I needed them and begin processing them.

The other day, I needed a list of all the software I’ve installed on my Windows laptop. There are several ways to do this in Windows, each of which will give slightly different, incomplete results (thanks, Microsoft!)

I use a combination of these two methods:

1. Launch Powershell
2. At the prompt, type wmic to open the Windows Management Instrumentation command line.
3. From the command line, use the following command:
   /output:C:\programs-list.txt product get name, version
   

This will create a file in the root of the C drive with a text file containing a list of programs installed on the system, along with the software’s self-reported version number.

The other method also uses PowerShell, but this time exports a list of programs that are listed as available for uninstall in the Windows registry.

From a PowerShell window, run the following command:

Get-ItemProperty HKLM:\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\* | Select-Object DisplayName, DisplayVersion, Publisher, InstallDate | Format-Table -AutoSize > C:\InstalledApps.txt