A couple of weeks ago, we have received the following support request from a WinAutomation user:

"How can I change a file's modified date? I figured out how to get the modified date but can't figure out how to change it. Essentially I have a TIF and JPG file and I want to make the JPG have the same modified date as the TIF file."

One of the tasks that almost everyone repeats daily is the URL shortening. Whenever we want to post a link in our twitter/facebook status, we usually follow the steps below:

1) Select and copy the really long URL to the clipboard (Ctrl+C),
2) Paste it in a shortening service's form,
3) Hit the submit button,
4) Wait for the service to return the short URL,
5) Copy the short URL,
6) Paste the short URL into our social networking site.

Have you ever wondered if you could automate your twitter posting? With WinAutomation you can! WinAutomation allows you to pull “tweets” from either a text file or an Excel spreadsheet and post them in Twitter based on a schedule. In this example, we are going to automate this specific task using a new action that has been introduced in WinAutomation v3: the "Download from Web" action.

In WinAutomation, you can execute a job in the background only if you do not use any interactive actions to build it. Interactive actions include all actions under "Windows" category (e.g "Focus Window", "Close Window" etc) and "Mouse and Keyboard" category (e.g "Move Mouse", "Send Keys" etc). If you do use such actions, you will not be able to run the job in the background (e.g. when there is no user logged in the machine or when the computer is locked). Of course, if your job includes file and folder related actions, or sending emails, zip files, ftp, then you can totally use the machine to execute other tasks while your job is running in the background.

When you are working with text, a very common need that arises is a way to remove the first row that is contained in a text file. Fortunately, WinAutomation allows you to manipulate text with a lot of “tools”, so this is a problem that can be solved in many different ways. For the purposes of this article, we will implement a solution that uses lists to remove the first row of a text file.