Tag Archives: cmd

OS

Delete windows.old folder

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Some time ago I upgraded my Windows Server 2012 machine to Windows Server 2012 R2. The upgrade was seamless and the server has hummed along just fine until recently, when it began running out of space.

Windirstat, a great little disk space usage reporting program, reported that the largest hog of space was the windows.old folder. Upon upgrade of the OS, the old Windows folder was renamed to Windows.old to make room for the new OS files and has sat there, untouched, ever since.

I tried to remove this folder with hilarious results. The folder is owned by TrustedInstaller. Easy enough, I’ll just replace the owner with my own user account, right? Wrong. Even after becoming the owner of the folder and everything inside it, I was prompted that I needed permission from… myself.. to delete the folder. I then tried changing the owner to “Everyone” and receive a rother comical message that I needed permission from Everyone to remove the folder. That would take some time!

everyone
You need permission from everyone.

That’s when I decided to throw in the towel and google. The solution to this problem involves the command line (thanks to here for the information.) Open an administrator command prompt and issue the following commands:

takeown /F c:\Windows.old\* /R /A /D Y
cacls c:\Windows.old\*.* /T /grant administrators:F
rmdir /S /Q c:\Windows.old

That did the trick! No more full disk.

CLI

Use batch script to continually check site status

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Recently my blog went down (the ISP running it had downtime.) I wanted to see when it came back up. As a result I wrote a little Windows batch script to continually poll my address in order to do just that.

The script issues a query to the default DNS server as well as pings the address of the blog. I used both since sometimes in Windows a ping will simply use internal system cache, which may be wrong if the IP address hosting my blog changes (it’s address is dynamic.)

The script is below:

@ECHO OFF
:loop
 cls
 nslookup jeppson.org | findstr "Address" | findstr /V 10.97.160.160
 ping -n 1 jeppson.org
 timeout /t 3
goto loop

I use the /V argument to take out the first bit spit out from the nslookup command, namely the IP address of the nameserver being used.

A simpler version of the script only issues one ping, waits a second, and then repeats the command. This is different from doing ping -t because it forces ping to do a new lookup for the domain name, whereas ping -t only resolves the IP once, then just pings the IP address. That wouldn’t work in my case as the IP of the domain name changes when it comes back online.

@ECHO OFF
:loop
 ping -n 1 jeppson.org
 timeout /t 1
goto loop

Thanks to Stack Overflow for educating me on how to write a quick loop to emulate the Linux Watch command,  ping only once, and use an application similar to grep to clean up output.