Creating a script to open and save a file

Question

I currently have about five thousand 2D drawings, under many directories on one server, and all of them have a .prt extension. These files were created in the 90's using a software called CADKey. Unfortunately... the .prt file extension is not compatible with brand new software so I cannot open until I save it as a .dwg file in the old CADKey software. We were talking about bringing somebody to go through and open each drawing and export it to a .dwg format but, I wondered if there was a way to automate this process. I am not asking anyone to write me a script that does this, I just need some guidance because I don't know how to approach this problem. I need to know what tools and languages I need to learn in order to accomplish this.

So far I have found a way to cleverly manipulate all the code writing(or so I think). I have used a tool that created a text file with all the locations on my server that have a file with the extension .prt. Once I know how to write the script file that can open the drawings and export them... I will dump the text into excel and use a find and replace command to write the rest of my code.

Basically - I need to know what tool or language i can use to create a script that will open a file at any given path and then export it with a new file extension at the same given path.

The computer is running Windows XP.

Answer 1

There are various ways to do this and various languages too.

VBScript could do this, although it will probably be harder to learn.

AutoIt or AutoHotkey both are simple macro scripting programs which have a very simple syntax based language that will do it nicely for you too.

I've worked with both programs and in this case, I think AutoIT will have the advantage for what you want to do.

You should look towards using the keyboard to execute everything (easiest)

Your script could even alt-tab to notepad which has all the files, copy one row with a filename, alt-tab back to the program, send the alt key, then navigate the menu to open a file (unless there's a shortcut key that'll work) Then paste the content of the clipboard into the filename dialog and send an enter to load that file. Add a wait so the loading can be completed, then use the menu to export it again, and add another wait. Be sure to wait sufficient time so you're sure the loading and saving will be done before the next part in the script can finish.

You get the idea. Let it go past your list until the end. You can even count each loop and when you reach like 1000 files, you can stop. You probably know how many rows your textfile has, so it'll be easy to loop that many times.