Script Windows

Author: Paul Slavic

In addition to all traditional languages and tools for scripting Windows tasks, such as VBScript and batch files, I want to take a look at the new bright alternative: free PHP. It is a mature, feature-rich scripting language that has lots of external modules, covering almost all you can think of. Power, simplicity and flexibility of PHP makes it a natural choice to automate various tasks you have to deal with regularly.

Starting from version 5, PHP has the command line interface (CLI) which allows to use PHP scripts the way you use batch files now. And thanks to the programs like Script GUI, PHP can have Windows GUI too, which can be easily created with HTML.

With PHP you can do lots of things:

Batch rename or timestamp files
Do batch text replace
Modify PDF and MS Office files
Automate retrieving / submitting information to websites
Parse HTML code using HTML DOM module
Connect and get messages from POP3 and IMAP mailboxes
Connect to databases, including ODBC, MS SQL, SQLite, etc
Generate and manipulate images, for example, add website name to them
Extract and manipulate ID3 tags from MP3 files
Script ActiveX controls
Manipulate XML data
Compress / decompress data
Compare directories using file hashes
Automate printing
Extract information from webservices via SOAP protocol

This makes PHP an excellent free alternative to the languages like Visual Basic and with Script GUI you can easily have graphic user interface.

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