It’s a royal pain to do proper .INI file editing using a DOS command. True that you can script out a little VBS to do the trick but it would be really nice to have .INI file editing native to action script.
INI set
filename, section, key, value
(will overwrite existing or create if missing for section/key/value)
This is an interesting idea, but we generally try to keep the action language simple. Generally for these types of requests, we suggest you use a utility tool or a simple script in some language.
Quick tech note about our languages…
BigFix has two languages:
Action Script – A simple action language with basic shell commands, file commands, and minimal control statements.
Relevance – A full-featured powerful query language that is designed to inspect computer state.
For most operating systems, there are very good “action languages” including shellscript, perl, vbscript, javascript, batch script, and so on (some are clearly better than others). However, there is practically no good “query language” that can inspect the current state of a computer. You might make the argument that WMI for Windows is a pretty good query language, but WMI is relatively slow, cumbersome, has a relatively high failure rate, and only works on Windows. Also, WMI has the ability to change the state of the computer and Relevance is designed to not change the state of the computer (thus allowing you to “safely” make Relevance queries with a very high expectation of not causing problems on the agent computers).
As an interesting note… If you add up the pages of the Relevance language references for each OS we support (the “Inspector Guides”) – Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, HPUX, and Mac OSX – you will find it totals 1352 pages. The action guide is 60 pages. This gives you a sense of where we spend our language development resources.