Auto processing script options for XPP on the Windows Platform

When we upgrade the XPP 8.4 environment later this year we will be moving from Solaris to XPP 9 something on the Windows platform. With Solaris we wrote C-shell scripts to perform pre-processing that included calling Xychange, ToXSF, compose and Postscript/PDF file creation and then some post-processing things.

It appears that Perl is now the preferred scripting method. But in the Windows environment is PowerShell also an option? I don’t see anything in the 9.2 documents that mentions it as a scripting option.

TIA.

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  • Barry,

    I have not tried this myself but you could give the following a try.

    Enter the following command in the autoproc spec:
    C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe "C:\ScriptFolder\MyAutoprocScript.ps1"

    The path of the incoming file will be added to this command and available in your PowerShell script as $args[0]

    But before you can successfully try this out you will have (or your sys admin) to reset the 'Execution Policy' from the default 'Restricted' to 'RemoteSigned'. Just do a google search on how to do this.

    Personal Remark:
    Writing your autoproc scripts in perl gives you the advantage that you write them in a language that is platform independent.

    Writing XPP scripts in C or bash shell or Powershell or as bat files ties them to a platform and makes changing platform just a bit more difficult.
    So if you would ask me what is the best language to write your XPP scripts, I would answer without a doubt: perl.
    Because: you never know  on what platform your XPP system will run 10 years from now, you only know that XPP will still be running :-)

    Oh and let us know if this was successful...

  • Thanks Bart. Management is tending to stay away from languages where we have limited development resources (personnel) like Perl. The majority of our OS's are Windows based. Security is also a major concern, both internally and externally. Thus the question about PowerShell. Thank you for mentioning the Execution Policy item. I appreciate your reply. Barry
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