Trying to automate something...

[sabot77]

Hi everyone,

I must say this looks like a very nice community to spend time in, I haven't seen one flame or troll in all the messages!

I do a ton of virus scanning on the test machines at my tech shop. I generally keep the AV on my test machine extremely up to date, connect foreign hard drives to it and remove virii in that way, but the temp and temporary internet files on most of my end users machines will generally kill an extra hour of scan time if I don't manually go in and remove them.

I'm trying to figure out a way for a script of some kind to go into each user under the Documents and Settings folder and remove the temp and temporary internet files folders prior to scanning. Windows has a few automatic users there all the time such as All Users, Administrator, LocalService, etc. My question is, Is there a way to have a system variable or something that can remove those temp folders out of the Local settings folder?

Or perhaps a cmd line command to remove dir anything with temp recursively or something?

Is there a system variable that stands for "I dont care what it is, but if it has "temp" in it I want it gone!" ?

Any suggestions are welcomed, thanks!

[Chaos]

You could try something like autoit to automate frequent stuf that you do -

http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/index.php

There is a yahoo group for autoit - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AutoItList/

If you register there you can donwload a program that will record what you do and then you can use this with autoit to make an exe file for you.

[herulach]

Are they stored in the same place or are there individual local user names? if its the former you want to look into something like deltree "insert path to temp files here" in a .bat file.
If not then you might want to lok at the new shell for windows, msh which is pretty sweet and you could do what you want with no trouble.

[happytechie]

You can also do it with the for command in a batch file.

Basically use the for comand to cycle through all of the users available underneath Documents and settings.

you'll need to use the dos type 7.23 names, you can access these with a dir /X at the command prompt. Documents and Settings will be: DOCUME~1



ty

[chrestomanci]

I would stick perl on the test machine, and then write a simple script to find all the directories to clear out.

You could also use cygwin, as it's shell suppords wild card expansion, then you can type something like:

rm -rf /cygdrive/e/Documents\ and\ Settings/*/Local\ Settings/Temporary\ Internet\ Files/

Where 'e' is the drive letter of the user's HD you have just connected.

[TheAnimus]

i would use MSH rather than perl, purely because perl in a security context makes me shudder. Even thou it shouldn't matter at all in this case, it makes me shudder.

[Cronus]

Here's a batch file that should do what you want:

@ECHO OFF
FOR /D %%A IN ("z:\Documents and Settings\*") DO (
  IF EXIST "%%A\Local Settings\Temp" (
    RD /S "%%A\Local Settings\Temp"
    MD "%%A\Local Settings\Temp"
  )
  IF EXIST "%%A\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files" (
    RD /S "%%A\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files"
    MD "%%A\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files"
  )
)
pause

Just change the z: to the letter of the attached drive then save is as a .BAT file.

It basically loops through all folders in the Documents and Settings folder and deletes then recreates the 'Temp' and 'Temporary Internet Files' folders. For saftey reasons it prompts you before deleting each folder.