What is the most useful script you've written for everyday life? [closed]

Answer 1

Mass file renaming via drag&drop.

Ages ago I've made a small VBScript that accepts a RegEx and replaces file names accordingly. You would simply drop a bunch of files or folders on it. I found that to be very useful throughout the years.

gist.github.com/15824 (Beware, the comments are in German)

Answer 2

A little script that monitors some popular websites for ads that match my skills and email me an email.

Answer 3

On Windows XP, I have set an AT job to run this command daily in C:\

dir /s /b * > dirlist.txt

This lists the full path of all files on the C drive. Then whenever I need to find a file, I can use findstr. This beats using Windows Explorer Search since it allows regular expression matching on the entire path. For example:

findstr ".jpg" dirlist.txt
findstr /i /r "windows.*system32.*png$" dirlist.txt

This is a very fast solution to set up, and great if you find yourself with a fresh Windows install and no internet connection.

If you need to search within certain file types for some pattern, first list all of the files you need to check, then search within them. For example, to find a Java or Python program that flips an image you could do this:

findstr "\.java \.py" dirlist.txt > narrowlist.txt
findstr /i /r /f:narrowlist.txt "flip.*image"

Answer 4

"backup.sh" that tars up the contents of a directory and sends it to my gmail account.

Answer 5

A Greasemonkey script which removes obviously stupid[*] comments from gaming site Kotaku.com.

[*] As identified by common spelling mistakes, all-caps writing, excessive use of "LOL" and similar heuristics.

Answer 6

A few years ago I wrote a winforms app with the help of a few win32 api's to completely lock myself out of my computer for an hour so that it would force me to go and exercise. Because I was lazy? No... because I had a personal fitness goal. Sometimes you just need a little kick to get started :)