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Some 7-Zip command line examples

David Dernoncourt — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 10:29:12 +0000

As mentioned in the previous post, 7-Zip is a great piece of open-source compression software. Although you’ll most likely want to use the GUI version for daily use, power users may find the command line version useful for batch jobs. The command line version is bundled in the global installation package, so as far as you installed 7-Zip you do have the command line version installed, too.
Since the 9.x versions have been around for quite a while now and the 4.65 version is getting old, we’ll only cover the 9.x versions (at the time of writing, the 9.15 beta offered as a portable application in the above-mentioned post). If you want to stick with the 4.65 version I suggest you have a look as those examples or at the documentation (the Windows batch commands are of course the same but the 7-Zip parameters are a bit different, and also the executable itself has a different name: 7za.exe instead of 7z.exe).

For all those examples, we’ll assume that 7-Zip is installed in G:\UTILITIES\7-Zip\. Also, note that if you want to launch those commands from within a batch file instead of directly from the command line, you need to add an additional ‘%’ in front of ‘%A’ in the for commands. Finally, we are using LZMA2 with the maximum compression level. If you want LZMA, well, obviously just replace -m9=LZMA2 with -m9=LZMA. It’s actually easy to do a lot more customization, just check out 7-zip.chm in your 7-Zip installation folder.

Batch compressing individual files (non recursive)

This one will compress every file located within the current directory (one archive per file) and which have a bmp or txt extension:
for %A in (*.png *.txt) do "G:\UTILITIES\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -t7z -m9=LZMA2 "%A.7z" "%A"

Batch compressing individual files (recursive)

This one will individually (one archive per file) compress all files located within L:\My\Folder\ (and all sub-folders) and which have a txt or doc extension:
for /R "L:\My\Folder\" %A in (*.txt *.doc) do "G:\UTILITIES\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -t7z -m9=LZMA2 "%A.7z" "%A"
Also, note that all archives will be placed in the same folder as the file the contain (so there will be archives all around all sub-folders).

Batch compressing all folders of the current directory

This one will compress every folder of the current directory (one archive per first sub-level folder):
for /D %A in (*) do "G:\UTILITIES\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -t7z -m9=LZMA2 "%A.7z" "%A"

Source

To write those commands the following pages were useful:

FOR looping command at SS64.com Command line reference
Windows batch – loop over folder string and parse out last folder name at stackoverflow
7-zip multiple files into multiple .zip and Batch compressing help on SourceForge.net 7-Zip forums

A few Windows 7 customization tips

David Dernoncourt — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 09:31:47 +0000

This week-end I had to set up Windows 7 on my new computer, since Windows XP is getting abandoned by Microsoft (as far as I know, notably MSIE 9 won’t make it to XP)

Creating an extended partition under Windows 7

Yeah, that was one of the first surprises: the over simplified Windows partitioner wouldn’t let me create an extended partition. It turned out that it can indeed create an extended partition, but it will only offer you to do so if you already have 3 primary partitions. An alternative would be to get a third party partitioning tool: that’s a bit expensive for a one-time partitioning. I finally discovered that Windows 7 features a command line partitioning utility, diskpart, which can create an extended partition. The complete procedure is quite simple:

open the run menu (windows key+R), type diskpart, then enter. You might get one of those annoying security popups, click yes.
Then select the drive you want to partition (its name is indicated in the GUI Windows partitioning tool, usually it should be disk 0 unless you have several hard drives): select disk 0.
Then create the extended partition (it will use all the remaining space): create partition extended

Resuscitating the Quick Launch bar

The Quick Launch bar was one of those really useful features from Windows XP that got stupidly removed from Se7en. It was replaced by the ability to “pin” a program to the taskbar, which doesn’t sound too bad… except that it’s much BIGGER. I think a pinned program icon takes around twice as much space as a program icon in the Quick Launch bar. Additionally, the Quick Launch bar can be partially displayed, with the extra icons getting packed in a one-click reachable menu. This is not possible with the pinned programs (I think the “equivalent” would be to pin them to the Start Menu, which isn’t nearly as practical as the Quick Launch bar in my opinion). So, for those reasons I tried to find a way to get this bar back. I eventually found some detailed tutorials on SevenForums and on How-To Geek. Here is a summary of them:

Right-click on the taskbar, then go to Toolbars → New Toolbar…
Navigate to C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch and click on Select Folder. The Quick Launch bar appears.
Right-click on the Quick Launch and deselect Show Title and Show Text. Still in the same menu, go to View to select the size you want for the icons.
Finally, to place the Quick Launch bar on the left, you need to move what’s on its left to the right (moving something to the left extends it while moving something to the right first shrinks it but eventually moves it to the right of the next object): grab the movement line of the taskbar (the dotted line which should be next to the start menu icon) and move it to the right.

That’s it, you now have your good old Quick Launch bar

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: curl_init()

David Dernoncourt — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:08:01 +0000

I encountered this message when we enabled upload from URL on Wiki4Games. To solve the problem, you just need to enable curl support in PHP. For Windows, this is done by uncommenting extension=php_curl.dll in php.ini. For Linux (at least in Ubuntu), this is done by installing php5-curl (apt-get install php-curl). Don’t forget to restart Apache (or just “apply changes” in Webmin).

What drivers for the GeForce 9650M GT?

David Dernoncourt — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 07:37:29 +0000

Update: solution found! => here

On my laptop (Adus M50Vn), I’ve had a lot of trouble with Linux (both Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.10) lately. After trying to update my NVIDIA graphics drivers on Windows XP, it turned out that the same problems starting to occur their too. So I was able to conclude that these issues were probably caused by the NVIDIA drivers and not by the OS itself. For Windows, I reverted back to the latest version I had installed without problem, version 180.70 (18 Nov 2008). For Linux, Ubuntu let me downgrade to 173 from the hardware drivers control panel (which at the moment seems to apply only to graphics drivers), and at first I didn’t understand why there wasn’t any other old version available (there were 2 choices only: 173 and 185). Then I did Fedora, but for this I had to go to NVIDIA’s website since Fedora doesn’t offer automatic installation for proprietary software. I eventually managed to find the legacy drivers page, which explained why Ubuntu let me only pick 173 as an old driver: it’s the latest legacy driver. Here is the Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris driver download page: http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html. Just pick the 173.14.20 and it should work fine. And actually, I just tried the 190.42 and it ~~seems to work okay too on Fedora so you may want to try that one instead~~ nvm it’s buggy too (NB: the 195.39 doesn’t work well on Windows XP: performances are much better but there are some important glitches).
Don’t forget that for Fedora (or any Linux installation which implies using NVIDIA’s official installer), with every kernel update you’ll need to re-run the NVIDIA driver installer… so keep it somewhere easy to find. Full installation procedure on Fedora 11:

CTRL+ALT+F2 to go to a text console
su to connect as root (of course you can also use sudo)
init 3 to shutdown X
run the installer (cd /directory then ./installer.sh). During the process it should be able to successfully update Xorg.conf.
init 5 to restart X without restarting the whole computer

Open source IZarc equivalent

David Dernoncourt — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 08:49:00 +0000

In my quest for always more open source software, I used to be a little disappointed on the side of compression/uncompression software. Sure, there is 7-Zip, but it doesn’t support shitloads of format, whereas on the freeware side I had found this IZarc that could open like every compression format I could met. Well, I finally found out, quite randomly while browsing PortableApps, that there is an open source equivalent for IZarc: PeaZip. The source isn’t very obvious to find, thus here is the link I dug out for you : PeaZip source packages on SourceForge
Ok, I still use 7-Zip because all the formats it supports are enough for me. But if I ever need more, now I’ll now where to look…
NB: it works on Linux too.

The 5 sins of Vista

David Dernoncourt — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 22:35:00 +0000

From a fan of Microsoft : the top 5 reasons why Vista is a step backward from previous versions of Windows.

Read on

Analysis of Microsoft’s Suicide Note (part 1)

David Dernoncourt — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 23:10:00 +0000

If Windows XP was Microsoft’s attempt to embed a browser into the operating system then Vista is the attempt to embed DRM.
Vista’s target market is content producers and the underlying philosophy of the user experience will be far different than what many consumers expect it will be. Microsoft has attempted to plug the infamous “analog hole” as much as is possible by forcing all data through encryption algorithms. For those unaware of the costs of encryption it is sufficiently high. Pushing HD audio and video content through encryption/decryption routines is a tremendous strain on any system currently available and in the near future.

Read on

BadVista.org: FSF launches campaign against Microsoft Vista

David Dernoncourt — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 06:42:00 +0000

From badvista.org

Vista is an upsell masquerading as an upgrade. It is an overall regression when you look at the most important aspect of owning and using a computer: your control over what it does. Obviously MS Windows is already proprietary and very restrictive, and well worth rejecting. But the new ‘features’ in Vista are a Trojan Horse to smuggle in even more restrictions. We’ll be focusing attention on detailing how they work, how to resist them, and why people should care”, said FSF program administrator John Sullivan.

Read on | Digg it

How Vista Lets Microsoft Lock Users In

David Dernoncourt — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 15:56:00 +0000

Technology called “Information Rights Management,” combined with copyright law and Windows Vista, give Microsoft the tools to hold users’ data hostage in Office, says Cory Doctorow.

37signals shows how ridiculous it is to install something in Windows Vista

David Dernoncourt — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 06:48:00 +0000

Clocking in at a stunning 35 clicks, the video shows that installing a script debugger in the new operating system is not only not made any easier, but it still takes a series of hoop jumps. They offer the same process in OS X for comparison.