Windows Scripting – The computer does the work
Windows Scripting
What is windows scripting? Scripting is one way of programming, which means that it is used to make the computer work for you. Windows scripting can be used by administrators who use Windows to perform all kinds of tasks easily and accurately. At the basis of Windows scripting, or other forms of scripting, is the idea that the computer will run for you specific, repetitive tasks, which you will write using Windows scripting. Windows scripting is especially easy because all of the tools necessary to do it are built-in into the system already. Actually, Windows scripting has been available since Windows 98. Over the time, the scripting language has evolved and changed. In this article, you will be reading about the basics of Windows scripting, that apply mostly to Windows XP.
Windows Scripting – Explanation
Here is a simple explanation how to start with Windows scripting. The first scrip which you will write is a simple one. The tool that you need for Windows scripting is the Notepad. You will open the Notepad and write this script: wscript.echo “Hello World”. Whatever you put between the quotation marks will be the output of your Windows scripting, for example, you could also put “My first Windows script”. The nest step of the Windows scripting is to save the Notepad file with the script in it under a name with a file extension .vbs which stands for Visual Basic Script. Thus, you can save the file as “hello.vbs”. You should also use quotation marks here so that Notepad doesn’t append the .txt file extension on your file name.
Windows Scripting – Running the script
Here is how to run your scrip. One way is to double click the file hello.vbs and then you will see a pop up window which will say Hello World. When you do more complicated Windows scripting for a series of tasks, you probably won’t want to deal with all of these pop up windows. In order to avoid that, you should run your scripts by the command center on Windows. You do this by opening a command window and typing in: cscript hello.vbs (which means that after the command cscript you write the name of the file of your script).
There are many places online where you can find ready-made Windows scripting to use on your computer. But first you must learn what that script will do to you. Programmers include comments in their scripts which are only seen by the one is writing the Windows scripting, and not by when the scripts are run. You can also do that with your scripts. Here is how to add comments and explanations to your hello.vbs script. You will use the symbol ‘ or REM at the beginning of a line which is a comment in your Windows scripting. That would look like this:
‘ This is a typical Hello World program
wscript.echo “Hello World”
The first line is the explanation of the script and the second line is the script itself. There you have the basics for Windows scripting. Windows scripting is used by many administrators and programmers today, thus it is easy to find more information about it online, and learn how to deal with errors in Windows scripting.