Making Variable Substitution Work for You
The variable substitution process might force you to use escape sequences for symbols in hard-coded URLs, but it also presents you with an opportunity for flexible scripting: The substitution process means you can write simple one-liner batch files that use command-line arguments. This capability has been a real time-saver for me. I typically look up Microsoft Knowledge Base articles several times a week—a process that's extremely annoying via the GUI when you know exactly what you're looking for.
I start my browser, navigate to http://support.microsoft.com, and click Advanced Search. I select Article ID as the search type and enter 123456 to find Knowledge Base article 123456. This returns a search result set containing one item that I then need to click once more before I get to the article page.
For Web sites on which I need to look up information regularly, I have a handful of one-liner batch files that do the work for me via command-line variable substitution. When content providers modify their Web site structures, I occasionally need to modify the files—and these examples may go stale for that reason—but updating the batch files takes only a few seconds, and they easily save me a couple of hours of repetitive browser navigation every month. . . .
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start http://www.msnbc.msn.com/
start http://www.cnn.com/
the result was that one IE window was open, displaying the last website (cnn.com in this example). I.e., it was reusing the window, even though the IE Option "Reuse windows for launching shortcuts" is not checked. But what I wanted was to open each URL in the batch file in a separate window.
The solution (thanks to Alex) was to add a small delay between each START command. I used the UnxUtils sleep.exe, and using a 1 second delay caused this to work as desired.
Mark_sa March 13, 2008 (Article Rating: