I create many new temporary folders every day. I am looking for a quick way to paste a time/date stamp for each new folder name. Wondering if there is a way I can link the time stamp to a windows hot key and use a paste rule?
Don't want to use excel/word/cmd prompt and copy paste over to slow.
Google turned up useless so I knew I could turn here for some assistance!
Thank you.
You can use the %date% and %time% environment variables in a DOS prompt.
Based on this, you could edit the registry to place an Explorer context menu shortcut to a command that creates a new folder in the current directory, along the lines of mkdir "Temp created on %date% at %time%".
Unfortunately this won't be of much help - I just realized the date includes slashes "/" and the time uses colons ":", both of which are invalid characters in a file/folder name.
The following script will create a directory with the current timestamp (without the illegal characters):
Copy and paste that into something like "dirs.bat" and save it to your desktop. Then, with AHK, you could implement something like the following:Code:@echo off For /f "tokens=2-4 delims=/ " %%a in ('date /t') do (set mydate=%%c-%%a-%%b) For /f "tokens=1-2 delims=/:" %%a in ('time /t') do (set mytime=%%a%%b) set mydir="%mydate%_%mytime%" mkdir %mydir%
However, it will create the directory wherever the bat file is run from, in this case the Desktop. If there is a certain directory you're always creating these temp folders in, you could easily change the code to reflect that directory and place the .bat file in there.Code:RAlt::Run C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Desktop\dirs.bat, C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Desktop
Awesome! That totally gets a rep from me. +1 :)
Thanks friends. I will try to run a set up as described above. Thanks for the quick response as well!!
Just for further FYI with AHK, you can also run command line instructions directly from the script:
Code:code = (join& date /t time /t ) run %comspec% /k %code% return
As this was one of the top results for timestamps in Google, I'd thought I'd add a bit more.... Other options to use: Environment Variable Substrings: ie Extracts characters so 31/03/2012 = 12-03-31, and 14:59 = 1459 echo %date:~8,2%-%date:~3,2%-%date:~0,2% echo %time:~0,2%%time:~3,2% or another for loop format: for /f "tokens=1-3 delims=/" %%a in ('echo %date%') do @echo %%c%%b%%a or Time, w/o hundredths/sec: echo %time:~0,2%%time:~3,2% Environment Variable Substitution: ie Extracts characters so 31/03/2012 = 31032012, and 14:59 = 1459 echo %date:/=% Time, (with hundredths/sec) echo %TIME::=%
About 5 years ago, a friend of mine made a right-click context menu that did exactly this in XP. It was a real time saver! If anyone is thinking of making one, please let me know.
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