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Old May 1st, 2005, 5:24 PM   #2
mackenga
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Well, I think it's not /strictly/ the right forum, but it's not miles out; it is a shell-scripting task you want to do. Trouble is, on Windows you're quite restricted as far as scripting goes.

I'm not 100% sure what it is you want to write, but I think you'll probably find you have to do more learning than you'd hope in order to write this sort of program.

Most DOS/Windows scripts (equivalent in role to shell scripts on Unix) are written as Batch files, but the language is perverse and you really get sick of it very quickly. I recommend getting Tcl/Tk installed - it's free. You can download it at http://tcl.activestate.com/ - they'll try to sell you the 'professional' version but it's not like the free version is restricted or anything.

Then get a book - I like "Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk" by Brent Welch - see http://www.beedub.com/book/ - which really does cover everything. The nice thing about Tcl/Tk is that it's very high-level and easy to get into, but still a very rapid way to write GUI programs if you want to.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: the best thing about Tcl/Tk is that it's available for Unix, Windows and MacOS, and a script written on one platform (if you take a bit of care not to do unportable things) can usually run unmodified on any of the others.

Hope this helps!
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