Friday, May 21, 2004

All Hail XCOPY!

Not DVDXCOPY, just plain old MS-DOS XCOPY. It is the solution to a massive problem I've been having. As I develop tools for others to use, I distribute them rather clumsily by zipping it all up and dropping on the user's hard disk. The problem with this is that I have to set everything up on the user's machine, which takes a while, and which usually means that different people have different versions of the tools.

By simplifying my programs(mostly by converting al VB code into VBA macros, and by using a custom compilation of PERL, which doesn't require that environment variables be changed), I have been able to create a directory structure which contains all of my work. I then us XCOPY to copy this info onto a shared drive. By using the /D option every time I update some code, I can keep the shared drive copy completely up to date with my work. Then I have the end users run the same process in reverse, copying the new files onto their drives. It's quick and simple. Now, if I could only get the buttwipes to use the freakin' software!

1 Comments:

Blogger Scott said...

XCopy is a great tool. I used to use it to copy Windows CD's to harddrives when I was building machines with no CD-Rom drives. This was back in the windows 95 days when not every computer had a CD-Rom and win95 came on 15 floppy discs! Ah, those weren't the days.

12:42 PM  

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