[Solved]Shell - Dealing with Different Paths for Same File (Excel.exe)

[Dutch 4]

I have users that are running a bot on different PCs that have different paths to Excel 2010. Does anyone know how to format the shell command so that it will look in either one location or the other?

 

I've not been successful with using variables or functions within the shell statement. I've tried running:

 

shell("C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\Office14\\EXCEL.EXE")

shell("C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Office\\Office14\\EXCEL.EXE")

 

but if the first one fails the bot stops and errors out.

 

Thanks,

 

Ken

[Anonym 53]

Can't you let shell read the path from the Registry, or actually, there is symbol for the program directory. I can't remember the name of that variable though.

(this is a quite common error to do, I mean to assume that the name of the directory is "Program Files", while this in fact is not the case. In Sweden, for instance, the name of that directory in WindowsXP was "Program" and there were loads of problems coming from that due to the fact that Windows sometimes translated the names of directories to its 8 characters short form; PROGRAM~1

 

 

Google "environment variable" for program files, or something like that.

[Anonym 53]

Ah, %ProgramFiles%

 

So if you swap the string to the path to something like

 

shell("%ProgramFiles%\\Microsoft Office\\Office14\\EXCEL.EXE")

 

 

It should work. It needs some work still, but something like that. You can check it by executing cmd.exe and then do

 

echo %ProgramFiles%

[Anonym 53]

It's me again.

 

Actually this was much simpler than that. Check this out:

 

set(#x, $special folder("Program Files"), "Global")

 

 

Using this you should be able to concatenate the strings to get a correct path to Excel.

[Dutch 4]

It's me again.

 

Actually this was much simpler than that. Check this out:

 

set(#x, $special folder("Program Files"), "Global")

 

 

Using this you should be able to concatenate the strings to get a correct path to Excel.

 

Sweet! That works great! Thanks for your help!

 

Ken