[Editor's Note: Solve this month's Windows NT problem and get the chance to win $100 or a copy of one of the author's books about NT. Send your solutions via email (not as an attachment) to challenge@winntmag.com. Include your full name, mailing address, and connection to NT (e.g., administrator, user). Because of the number of entries, we cannot reply to all respondents. Look for the solution to this month's problem in the October issue.]
On the first Friday in July, the accounting department at the Get Rich Investment corporation was in a state of high tension. The staff was struggling to close the month, close the quarter, run the current week's payroll, issue vacation paychecks in advance, and get ahead on their tasks to enjoy a day off on July 4.
By 2:00 p.m., the office was humming. Nancy had finished entering the payroll data, and the checks were printing. John had completed balance sheets, profit-and-loss statements, detailed general-ledger-posting reports, and other data reports for the chief financial officer. John sent the reports to a high-speed laser printer dedicated to reports. Documents were flying out of the printer.
The laser printer suddenly stopped, and the ready light shined reassuringly; however, many reports still hadn't printed. John opened the printer's dialog box and found the least-important job stuck at the top of the queue. The eight reports behind the stuck report were essential. John couldn't pause, cancel, or delete the problem report, nor could he move the other print jobs ahead of it. No other printers were available.
Problem
How did John get the rest of his reports? How did he get rid of a stuck job when he couldn't use the printer's dialog box?
April Winners
Congratulations to Ken Zummach of Merritt Island, Florida, and to Kyaw Kyaw Khine of Woodside, New York. Ken won first prize of $100 for the best solution to the April Reader Challenge. Kyaw Kyaw won second prize of a copy of Windows NT Troubleshooting (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1998).
Problem
Joe and Moe comprise the entire Help desk staff for the BizzyBiz company. Joe considers himself a true computer nerd and carries the title with pride. Piles of reference books cover his desk. BizzyBiz employees refer to Moe as "the old curmudgeon." He has a sign over his desk that reads, "DOS Will Rise Again."
One day, a human resources (HR) employee comes to Joe and Moe for help. She wants to save time and paper, so she created several folders on her department's Windows NT 4.0 server to hold all the documents the HR staff distributes to employees.
Now she needs to know how to give employees access to the folders. Joe walks her through the steps for creating a share: Open My Computer, open the drive that contains the folders, right-click each folder, select Sharing from the shortcut menu, and so on. Moe mumbles to himself, "Using the command line to create shares is faster."
A few minutes later, the chief executive officer's secretary leans in Joe and Moe's doorway and tells them that when she opened NT Explorer, she noticed she had only a couple of megabytes of free disk space. "What do I do?" she asks. Joe suggests she delete all the temporary and document backup files. He tells her to open NT Explorer, select drive C, press F3, and enter
*.tmp
Moe interrupts, "But she'll have to wait for the search to finish, select the files, then delete them. Using the command line to delete the files is faster."
Moe is correct; using the command line is faster for these tasks. What commands do you use to create a share and to delete temporary and document backup files? Be sure to include the necessary switches, and explain each switch you use.
Solution
To create a share, open the command line and type
net share sharename=x:\foldername
in which x is the drive letter. Parameters include /unlimited (to allow unlimited users simultaneous access to the share), users: number, and /remark: "descriptive phrase".
To delete temporary and document backup files, open the command line and type
del x:\<directory>\*.tmp \*.<backup extension for software> \*.<backup extension for other software>/s /q /f
in which /s stands for delete from all subdirectories, /q stands for quiet mode (don't ask whether OK to delete), and /f stands for force deletion of read-only files.