dale lane

This might not be earth-shatteringly new to those who have seen my code before, but I was a little surprised. 🙂

A C program that I wrote a little while ago (and has previously worked fine on Windows, Linux, Solaris and HP) failed horribly on AIX. A little digging showed that I had written:

char* thisIsSupposedToBeAString[256];

I guess that at the time I wrote it (presumably early in the morning, and caffeine-fuelled) I had a string (char thisIsSupposedToBeAString[256];) and wanted a pointer to it, so went back and stuck a * on it without thinking.

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As I’ve started storing all of my project work and GTD notes in my Wiki program, I thought it might be a good idea to take regular backups of the text files it uses for data. And being a geek, I thought I’d automate it. 🙂

@ECHO OFF
REM this makes the batch file less noisy - dont 
REM  output commands to screen


REM limit scope for environment variables created here 
REM   to within this batch file only
SETLOCAL


REM make a note of where the current directory is 
REM   so we can go back there afterwards
REM  (useful when running this batch file manually)
set DIR_TO_RESTORE=%CD%


REM run the   'date /t' command
REM   this outputs in the format:
REM   19/11/2006
REM  (probably different for people with non-UK regional
REM   settings)


REM Using for to look at bits of date individually...
REM  FOR /F ["options"] %variable IN ('command1') DO command
REM   options - 
REM      tokens - identify which bits of the date output I want
REM               (3 tokens - day month year), 
REM      delimiters - how they are separated  ('/')
REM                 (users with non-UK regional settings might 
REM                   need to change this - e.g. for '-')
REM   command - 
REM     1) date /t  - show date without prompting to change it
REM     2) set  - set environment variables to store each token
FOR /f "tokens=1-3 delims=/ " %%G IN ('date /t') DO (
    REM set environment variables to store individual date values
    REM  (assumes date/month/year - users with non-UK regional
    REM     settings might want to switch date and month)
	set dd=%%G
	set mm=%%H
	set yy=%%I)


REM this gives us a numeric date - in the format yyyyMMdd
REM  which is useful in filenames for sorting
set TODAY=%yy%%mm%%dd%


REM go to first directory containing something to backup
REM  tar it up, and move it to a backups directory
cd "C:\\Documents And Settings\\Administrator\\My Documents\\bLADE My Documents\\"
"C:\\cygwin\\bin\\tar.exe" -cvf %TODAY%_gtd.tar WM_Wiki_Pages
move %TODAY%_gtd.tar "..\\My Personal\\WMWiki Backups\\."


REM repeat as required
cd "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Administrator\\My Documents\\My Personal\\"
"C:\\cygwin\\bin\\tar.exe" -cvf %TODAY%_ref.tar "My WM Wikis"
move %TODAY%_ref.tar "..\\My Personal\\WMWiki Backups\\."


REM finished! go back to where we started
cd %DIR_TO_RESTORE%


REM end scope for environment variables
ENDLOCAL

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