Autoruns

Microsoft has a free utility for Windows called autoruns, which can be downloaded here. Autoruns will generate a list of all programs which run automatically each time the PC is rebooted.

You can easily prevent any program from running upon startup by unchecking the box next to it.

255 character limit catcher

Path Length Checker is a free utility, with a very simple purpose: it helps you find file paths in a directory which exceed the 255-character limit in Windows Explorer. It can be downloaded here: https://github.com/deadlydog/PathLengthChecker/releases/tag/v1.9.1

No install is necessary. Just click the 'PathLengthCheckerGUI.exe' file and the utility will open.

Select a particular directory, and then click 'Get Path Lengths . . . '. You can choose to review path lengths within a specified character count range, or replace certain paths with shorter versions in the search results to see what changes to the directories will get you under the 255-character limit.

Open source grep utility - winGrep

Last night's tip, discussed AstroGrep, an open source grep utility with some limitations. One of its drawbacks is its inability to export only the results for a search to a text file.

grepWin is another free grep utility, available for download here, from developer Stefan Küng. Like AstroGrep, grepWin is a grep utility with only basic features, which can be used to run regular expression searches in text files and some other types of files but not PDFs. While grepWin will not allow only the regex pattern matches to be exported to a file, it does allow the source files to be edited with find and replace searches. This makes it possible to add delimiters to the source files before and after the regex pattern, so the data can be parsed in Excel later.

Note that you'll need to click Search after having run the Replace operation, so the edited version of the text files will be displayed in the results list in grepWin. You will then be able to save the results by clicking on the small arrow at the bottom right of the screen.