I had an interesting issue today. I was working with a product that needed select privileges to the sys tables and have ownership of the table it was going to use on a SQL 2005 Server. After trying various combination of permission settings. I came across the following two commands that did the trick for me.

Grant SELECT privileges to tables:

SELECT 'GRANT SELECT ON ' + TABLE_NAME + ' TO [user]' FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.Tables;

Change table ownership:

ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON [database].[table] TO [user];

Everything inside the [ ] are the portions that I had to change for my specific set up.

So if you ever need to grant select privileges tables or grant ownership to a table in SQL 2005, I hope this helps out.
Dave

It is very straight forward to copy the contents of one directory or folder to another folder using the copy command from the command line.

C:\myfiles>copy * C:\test

This command copies all the files in the C:\myfiles directory to the C:\test directory. This works very well if you are just copying the files from one directory to another and not needing to rename the files.

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I had a large set of zip files that I needed to extract. I could have used the built-in functionality in Windows XP but I really did not want to walk through the extraction wizard for each zip file. So I looked around for something I could use from the command line and I came across Info-ZIP. Once I had downloaded and extracted the utilities, I opened a command window and cd'd to the directory that contained all the zip files. Once there, I ran the following commands. The first one extracted the contents of the zip files (I was lucky and the structure of the zips included a new directory) and the second moved the zip file into its corresponding new directory.

C:\zips>for /f %j in ('dir /b *.zip') do [full path to]\unzip %j

C:\zips>for /f "delims=. tokens=1,2" %j in ('dir /b *.zip') do move %j.%%k %j

I hope this post was of some use to you. If it didn't, I am always looking for new scripts to add so submit a request for your question or need and I will see if I can answer it.

Dave

I know most everyone uses a mouse as their primary means for doing most everything on a PC and the mice work well. I find that using the mouse and certain keyboard combinations work extremely well for me.

Here are the keyboard combinations I use most frequently:

windows + l - to lock computer
windows + m - minimize all open windows
windows + f - find / search
windows + e - open explorer window
windows + r - open run window
windows + u - open utility manager

control + z - undo
control + x - cut
control + c - copy
control + v - paste
control + n - new window / file
control + a - select all
control + s - save
control + f - find / search
control + p - print
control + o - open file / web page

Hopefully these will be as useful to you as they are to me.

Dave

If you are like me and use a windows machine as your primary machine. You know what a headache it is when you finally find some snippet of code or other solution only to see that the solution is in a tar.gz file format. Sure you could purchase an archive software solution that supports the tar.gz format, but there is a free alternative, Gzip for Windows.

This is a command line utility, so there is no pretty GUI to use. For me, that is ok, I find it easier to deal with using the command line for extracting and building tar files.

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