Reg Cleaner
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From: John Corliss on 4 Apr 2010 21:53 za kAT wrote: > John Corliss wrote: >> John Corliss wrote: >>> za kAT wrote: >>>> John Corliss wrote: >>>>> >>>>> What I'd like to be able to do isn't to do more cleaning, but to be >>>>> able to locate and display any entries that are longer than 256 >>>>> characters in length. >>>> >>>> Perhaps you could have a chat with this developer. >>>> >>>> http://www.codeproject.com/KB/recipes/RegistryDumper.aspx >>>> >>>> If you could adjust the code to forget the keys and just show values then >>>> you just need to search for line lengths> 256, or something like that. >>> >>> Since I already have an account with the site so I was able to download >>> the program. It might be good enough for my purposes if I use the output >>> in conjunction with something else (not sure what yet at this point >>> though.) > > (clipped) > I was gonna say, if it dumps really large text files maybe something like > > http://www.baremetalsoft.com/baregrep/index.php will help > > I vaguely remember it accepts large line lengths as well as Searching files > of any size (> 2GB) as is tolerant of binary characters. Looks like a really good one. Downloading now. Thanks again! -- John Corliss BS206. I block all Google Groups posts due to Googlespam, and as many posts from anonymous remailers (like x-privat.org for eg.) as possible due to forgeries posted through them. No ad, CD, commercial, cripple, demo, nag, share, spy, time-limited, trial or web wares OR warez for me, please. Adobe Flash sucks, DivX rules.
From: John Corliss on 4 Apr 2010 21:54 John Corliss wrote: > za kAT wrote: >> John Corliss wrote: >>> John Corliss wrote: >>>> za kAT wrote: >>>>> John Corliss wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>> What I'd like to be able to do isn't to do more cleaning, but to be >>>>>> able to locate and display any entries that are longer than 256 >>>>>> characters in length. >>>>> >>>>> Perhaps you could have a chat with this developer. >>>>> >>>>> http://www.codeproject.com/KB/recipes/RegistryDumper.aspx >>>>> >>>>> If you could adjust the code to forget the keys and just show >>>>> values then >>>>> you just need to search for line lengths> 256, or something like that. >>>> >>>> Since I already have an account with the site so I was able to download >>>> the program. It might be good enough for my purposes if I use the >>>> output >>>> in conjunction with something else (not sure what yet at this point >>>> though.) >> >> (clipped) >> I was gonna say, if it dumps really large text files maybe something like >> >> http://www.baremetalsoft.com/baregrep/index.php will help >> >> I vaguely remember it accepts large line lengths as well as Searching >> files >> of any size (> 2GB) as is tolerant of binary characters. > > Looks like a really good one. Downloading now. Thanks again! LOL. Eh... that is, for nagware. -- John Corliss BS206. I block all Google Groups posts due to Googlespam, and as many posts from anonymous remailers (like x-privat.org for eg.) as possible due to forgeries posted through them. No ad, CD, commercial, cripple, demo, nag, share, spy, time-limited, trial or web wares OR warez for me, please. Adobe Flash sucks, DivX rules.
From: VanguardLH on 5 Apr 2010 00:21 VanguardLH wrote: > ... but the actually *OS* updates. ... Okay, that boo boo was because I rewrote and shortened the sentence but forgot to change "actually" to "actual". > ... you are not generating the binary-formattery .dat files .. But how the hell did "formated" turn into "formattery". "ry" instead of "d" just isn't a fat-finger typo.
From: za kAT on 5 Apr 2010 05:19 On Sun, 04 Apr 2010 18:54:21 -0700, John Corliss wrote: > John Corliss wrote: >> za kAT wrote: >>> John Corliss wrote: >>>> John Corliss wrote: >>>>> za kAT wrote: >>>>>> John Corliss wrote: >>>>>>> >>>>>>> What I'd like to be able to do isn't to do more cleaning, but to be >>>>>>> able to locate and display any entries that are longer than 256 >>>>>>> characters in length. >>>>>> >>>>>> Perhaps you could have a chat with this developer. >>>>>> >>>>>> http://www.codeproject.com/KB/recipes/RegistryDumper.aspx >>>>>> >>>>>> If you could adjust the code to forget the keys and just show >>>>>> values then >>>>>> you just need to search for line lengths> 256, or something like that. >>>>> >>>>> Since I already have an account with the site so I was able to download >>>>> the program. It might be good enough for my purposes if I use the >>>>> output >>>>> in conjunction with something else (not sure what yet at this point >>>>> though.) >>> >>> (clipped) >>> I was gonna say, if it dumps really large text files maybe something like >>> >>> http://www.baremetalsoft.com/baregrep/index.php will help >>> >>> I vaguely remember it accepts large line lengths as well as Searching >>> files >>> of any size (> 2GB) as is tolerant of binary characters. >> >> Looks like a really good one. Downloading now. Thanks again! > > LOL. Eh... that is, for nagware. Tiny one, I'd forgotten your sensitivities. Not sure that is a good solution anyway, thinking about it. You need to sort by line length at least, or preferably chop those < 256 characters and it doesn't do that. There are loads of ways to do this scripting wise, easy under Linux I'm sure. Perhaps GNU tools. Cue someone with a cool one liner... -- zakAT(a)pooh.the.cat - www.zakATsKopterChat.com
From: VanguardLH on 5 Apr 2010 17:08
John Corliss wrote: >> Look at how much just YOUR user profile added to the registry. Those are >> all the settings for YOUR particular instance of the OS to differentiate >> it from any other Windows account also created and used under that same >> OS. > > But of course, there's only me using this computer; there are no other > user accounts on it than mine, not even a guest account. NT-based versions of Windows won't ever know that fact. They are designed to support multiple accounts. They are NOT designed like the old personal 9x-based versions of Windows where there was just one user (despite the login which merely kept separate the cached login credentials for the web browser). Each profile gets its own ntuser.dat registry hive. To permit all the isolation afforded by having separate Windows logins, all the user-specific settings get saved here. You have one login now. Windows doesn't care because there are already more profiles than just your own account, and you could create more. That you don't create more accounts has no effect on how Windows will manage the one that you did create. >> In the exported .reg file from your registry, just what OS-only >> configuration and operational data do you think should be omitted? > > That's simple! Anything less than 256 characters in length *or* anything > without a "/0" embedded in them. *That's* the stuff I want to be able to > take a look at. I haven't investigated the 256-char problem to know of a registry utility that looks specifically for registry key or data item names that are that long, or greater. As for looking for an embedded null character, and because it's when I want to delete a key that has it (but regedit.exe's parser won't handle it), I use SysInternals' RegDelNull utility. > "all the necessary settings for the Windows OS and any installed programs > should be able to be stored in a file the size of an e-book novel -that > is, about a half meg at most." I don't think I could have been any > clearer about that. Except that is also like asking for "War and Peace" to be contained within the same size as for some short story you found in Reader's Digest. There *is* that much more in the registry than in your little e-book novel. Stop trying to compare a novel to a full encyclopedia set. Also remember that there are only *two* real hives in the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and HKEY_USERS. All the others are pseudo-hives that are compiled on Windows startup from the real two hives. That means when you export the registry using regedit.exe (I don't know what ERUNT does), you will get redundant entries. That's why I mentioned looking the actual registry files on the hard disk (ntuser.dat and under system32\config) rather than relying on an exported copy. Because of the duplicated data, the exported version is 110MB while the sum total of ntuser.dat and the system32\config files was 53.6MB. The exported copy is twice the size of the real registry's size. I haven't used ERUNT to know if it omits the pseudo-hives from its exported copy. Yes, the registry is bigger than your little e-book. There are LOTS of documents bigger than your tiny 0.5MB e-book that you are striving to use in your comparison. As a comparison to a tangible document (not some unidentified short story in e-book form), I downloaded the instruction book for the 1040 tax form - the same one you get along with the 1040 form - and whose size is: PDF file (compressed): 3.3MB DOC file: 19.6MB Your wish to make pocket marbles out of boulders ain't gonna happen and is not realistic. > Is the 256 character limit on viewable entries a bug, slothful > programming or is it actually by design? It is a limit in tool being used: regedit.exe. It is not a limit of the registry's database files nor of using the system APIs to access those records. > By "system API" do you mean the Win32 API or the Native API? > > "There can also be registry keys with \0 embedded in them, making it > impossible to find those entries using the Win32 API but which can be > found via the native api." The same API that is afforded to utilities like SysInternals RegDelNull. Although on my wishlist of books to get and read from my local public library, I haven't yet delved into the "Windows Internals" book. Too many other books on my wishlist to first read, plus I'd like to wait until v5 of the book becomes available (at my library). > You misunderstand me. I'm not referring to deliberate malware attacks, > I'm referring to standard Registry inclusions which are not in my best > interests, and which may have originated from MS or the U.S. government. But you don't own their software. They give you what they want to give you. You only get to lease a version of it. Obviously they don't need to do anything in the registry to do whatever they choose to have their software do. If Microsoft were trying to perform covert functions within Windows, I doubt they would expose it to utilities that can read all of the registry. You can be just as paranoid about open-source Linux distributions and what they're putting into that, too, because neither of us are OS programmers to waste our time reviewing every byte of code to see what all the OS does. Yes, there are a select group of programmers that help develop the Linux distros but, gee, they could all be part of a cabal of thieves, too. Whether Windows or Linux or some other OS, it's THEIR code and you can choose to use it or not. Beyond what THEY afford to you for configurability and monitoring, you don't get to decide how their code works. |