Windows Batch Fun

Why?

Most of my time is spent on either Red Hat Enterprise Linux for work, or Fedora for play. But more times than not, my customers require that I remote into their environment. It’s usually a Virtual Desktop Interface, and most likely a Windows environment, so I get to explore the Wild Wild World of Windows.

This time around, for whatever reason - my putty sessions were not being persisted between Citrix Remote Sessions. This was a pain because I was administering a ton of servers, and due to how the remote session worked, I couldn’t cut and paste from my host machine into the virtual desktop. Plus, all the server names did not follow a naming convention, so two servers in a DEV environment weren’t necessarily closely named (like having a number or letter incremented).

Batch Tips

So my lazy efficient developer brain created a bunch of Windows Batch files to would organize my SSH sessions. I present to you a neat trick that probably took me an hour to work through, but will save me far more time in the future.

First, I organized all my servers by name. I prefixed all the server names with their respective environment. In particular, I kept it to a 4 character prefix: dev-, qat-, int-, or prd-.

Then I created a batch file with the following content.

set name=%~n0
start putty.exe -ssh username@%name:~4%

I didn’t want to open up each file and add the server name to it, since the file name already indicated the server. So, what the .bat file above does is take its own file name as a variable and strips off the first 4 characters. I didn’t know Windows Batch files were so flexible.

So now I’m left with a folder with several dozens of these batch files. An added benefit is adding new servers to my inventory/folder is quite easy. All I gotta do is just copy any one of these, and rename it with the proper server name.

dev-server1234abc.bat
dev-server4123abd.bat
int-server3258afz.bat
int-server3258jgz.bat
prd-server99935d3.bat
prd-server0923ssd.bat

Really?

Was this really necessary? Maybe not, but I learned something new along the way. What I should have probably done was figure out what’s up with the Citrix Remote Session…