Favorite Windows 8 Feature: Intra-Line Tab Completion

Fixed in Windows 8 is intra-line tab completion - you can try it out on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview now. If you open a command prompt, type a command, then move your cursor back into a token in the middle of the command and tab complete, the tab completion works on that whitespace delimited token and doesn't erase all text following the cursor. Like it does in pre Windows 8. And annoys the hell out of me. Yay!

Command line for finding missing URLACTIONs

I wanted to ensure that my switch statement in my implementation of IInternetSecurityManager::ProcessURLAction had a case for every possible documented URLACTION. I wrote the following short command line sequence to see the list of all URLACTIONs in the SDK header file not found in my source file:

grep URLACTION urlmon.idl | sed 's/.*\(URLACTION[a-zA-Z0-9_]*\).*/\1/g;' | sort | uniq > allURLACTIONs.txt
grep URLACTION MySecurityManager.cpp | sed 's/.*\(URLACTION[a-zA-Z0-9_]*\).*/\1/g;' | sort | uniq > myURLACTIONs.txt
comm -23 allURLACTIONs.txt myURLACTIONs.txt

I'm not a sed expert so I had to read the sed documentation, and I heard about comm from Kris Kowal's blog which happilly was in the Win32 GNU tools pack I already run.

But in my effort to learn and use PowerShell I found the following similar command line:

diff 
(more urlmon.idl | %{ if ($_ -cmatch "URLACTION[a-zA-Z0-9_]*") { $matches[0] } } | sort -uniq) 
(more MySecurityManager.cpp | %{ if ($_ -cmatch "URLACTION[a-zA-Z0-9_]*") { $matches[0] } } | sort -uniq)

In the PowerShell version I can skip the temporary files which is nice. 'diff' is mapped to 'compare-object' which seems similar to comm but with no parameters to filter out the different streams (although this could be done more verbosely with the ?{ } filter syntax). In PowerShell uniq functionality is built into sort. The builtin -cmatch operator (c is for case sensitive) to do regexp is nice plus the side effect of generating the $matches variable with the regexp results.

clip.exe - Useful tool I didn't know shipped with Windows

When you run clip.exe, whatever comes into its standard input is put onto the clipboard. So when you need to move the result of something in your command window somewhere else you can pipe the result into clip.exe. Then you won't have to worry about the irritating way cmd.exe does block copy/pasting and you avoid having to manually fixup line breaks in wrapped lines. For instance, you can put the contents of a script into the clipboard with:

more cdo.cmd | clip

I've got a lot of stuff dumped in my bin folder that I sync across all my PCs so I didn't realize that clip.exe is a part of standard Windows installs.

Nice for avoiding the block copy in cmd.exe but I'd prefer to have the contents sort of tee'd into the clipboard and standard output. So TeeClip.ps1:

$input | tee -var teeclipout | clip;
$teeclipout;