Details about what’s new can be found in the Fileaze shareware 1.0.5 announcement post

Please note that the improvement to the email action doesn’t apply here since Fileaze Lite doesn’t support network functionalities.

Fileaze Lite 1.0.5 will be released too within a couple of weeks.

LICENSING NOTE

Fileaze 1.0.5 is a FREE upgrade for all current customers. You don’t
need a new serial for 1.0.5 if you already purchased one for any
previous version.

UPGRADE INSTRUCTIONS

To upgrade preserving your data, first make a full backup of your
machine and be sure you can restore it if anything goes wrong.
Download the installer from the Fileaze website and install over the
old version WITHOUT uninstalling first. You won’t need to re-enter the
registration information if upgrading a licensed installation.

WHAT’S NEW

- The email account editor now accepts e-mail address where the mailbox part is composed of digits only, e.g. 123456@example.com

- A new option in the delete action allows for removal of matching folders in sources that are found empty when the action runs. Previously, empty folders were ignored (this behavior is preserved now if you leave the option unchecked)

- Fixed some minor bugs, which improves the reliability of the application

About Fileaze Lite

Fileaze Lite, the stripped-down version of the shareware Fileaze, is an automation tool for batch file tasks allowing you to execute sequences of operations on a collection of files and folders. Fileaze Lite can batch-copy, move, rename, delete, change attributes and dates. It supports text replacement, Regular Expressions in pattern matching to help you fine-tune your file selection and parameterized execution through a set of predefined constants that are evaluated and substituted at run-time. Fileaze Lite lets you select files from multiple locations within a single job so you can easily automate complex and tedious manual tasks by turning them into smart jobs. By combining all these features you can create batch jobs from the simplest to the most sophisticated. Fileaze can become a backup tool or a batch renamer or you can turn it into an automatic digital photo downloader that creates date-based folders for smart photo organization.

LICENSING NOTE

Fileaze 1.0.4 is a FREE upgrade for all current customers. You don’t need a new serial for 1.0.4 if you already purchased one for any previous version.

UPGRADE INSTRUCTIONS

To upgrade preserving your data, first make a full backup of your machine and be sure you can restore it if anything goes wrong. Download the installer from the Fileaze website and install over the old version WITHOUT uninstalling first. You won’t need to re-enter the registration information if upgrading a licensed installation.

WHAT’S NEW

- The Copy, Move, Rename and Delete actions all have a new option to retry the operation a specified number of times after a specified delay if the file can’t be accessed because locked.

- The Copy, Move and Rename action include a new option to control overwriting of existing files that let you choose between “Always”, “Never” and “Only if not readonly”.

- The Delete action can now optionally remove the folder previously containing the deleted file if found empty or all the empty folders up to the folder specified as source in the job.

- The E-mail action can now be suppressed if there are no files to attach to the message.

- FTP host settings now support the host:port syntax, allowing FTP connections to be made on non standard ports.

- The log window now shows the full path and filename of the log file in the titlebar, making it easy to find it for further processing.

- The log window has been increased in width and the font has been changed to fixed width to increase readability.

- Logging can now be set for all events, only errors or none.

- It’s now possible to create chains of independent jobs by specify a secondary job to be run after the main job finishes executing (both for manual and scheduled execution). Options are available to execute the secondary job (or different secondary jobs) in different scenarios: when the main job finishes successfully with at least one source, when it succeeds even without sources, when it succeeds with minor errors (typically action errors) and/or when it fails due to major errors (typically source errors).

- A new tutorial (no. 5) is included in the help and in the tutorial section here, showing how to leverage some of these new features by creating a chain of two jobs that e-mails you the log file of the main job.

For a detailed explanation of all these features, please refer to the help files included with the application.

Note: this tutorial presumes that you followed the previous ones and are able to perform the operations explained there.

Fileaze (starting from version 1.0.4) allows you to chain job execution by specifying what job to run after the completion of a given job. This feature opens a huge range of possibilities but it’s important to understand that the jobs are kept totally independent of each other and the chained execution is an automated way to achieve what previously you could only do manually. A typical usage of this feature is to have a secondary job e-mail you the log file of a primary job automatically. In this tutorial we explain how to create this workflow.

Let’s start by creating a simple job that makes a copy of a file:

(We won’t dive into details here, this step is trivial if you followed the previous tutorials)

Now run the job and open the log window. The title bar shows the full path of the log file (highlighted with a red rectangle here). This is the file we’ll attach to the e-mail when creating the secondary job. Note that the file is named after the internal job ID and will be different when you replicate this tutorial. Take a note of the name for reference in a later step.

Close the log window and create a new job. This will be the secondary job that e-mails out the log file so let’s name it “E-mail log file”:

Add a File source that points to the log file previously identified:

Then add an E-mail action filling in the parameters as needed (remember to add an e-mail account inside the E-mail Accounts window if you didn’t already do it) and save the job:

Now let’s get back to the main job. Edit the job and go to the Advanced tab.

It’s usually a good idea to enable the option to automatically clear the log before every job execution to avoid e-mailing log files that get longer and longer. Also, starting from 1.0.4, you can decide here what to log (every event, errors only or nothing at all - which wouldn’t fit this tutorial use case, of course).

Inside the “Secondary job execution” we need to indicate what job to run after the main job’s execution. Here we have several non-exclusive options to choose from, depending in what cases we want the secondary job to run (successful execution with or without actual sources or with minor errors or failed execution due to major errors - refer to The Advanced tab inside the application help files for more details). Let’s choose the first option: enable the first checkbox and choose the E-mail job you just created from the menu:

We’re done. Save the job and run it. If everything was setup correctly, you will get the usual Running job window

but this time, when you click “OK”, the secondary job will run

Note: In case of a scheduled job, no manual operation will be needed. The secondary job will run automatically after the first job finishes.

After a while, check your inbox. You’ll find the e-mail message sent by Fileaze

with the expected log file attached!

For a more in-depth description of Fileaze Lite, please read this page.

At the same time, we removed the special introductory $10 discount and finally set the regular price to $29.99, at which Fileaze is still one of the cheapest automation tools around! Thanks for all the customers who purchased Fileaze early and contributed to it’s growing success!

Note: this tutorial presumes that you followed the previous ones and are able to perform the operations explained there. It also assumes you have a copy of the rar.exe command line tool: this is included with WinRAR and can be found inside the installation directory. If you don’t have WinRAR you can download a trial version following the link at the end of this tutorial.

Working with command line tools in Fileaze is as easy as adding the “Command” action to a batch job, but there are some things to consider to avoid pitfalls.

Suppose you want to compress with RAR all the files in a folder:

All you need to do is to create a job and add that folder as a source:

Note: We’ll keep things simple here. From the previous tutorials you already know you can select multiple sources, from your disk, an FTP server and many others, that you can filter in many ways and that you have options for keeping the original paths or not. If those concepts are not clear to you, we suggest you to walk through the previous tutorials, here we’ll deal with a simple folder source to focus on the command line operations.

The next step is to create the command action that invokes the rar.exe tool but before doing it let’s add some considerations. As any other executable file, when Fileaze runs it runs “in its own directory”, meaning that if Fileaze is installed in “C:\Program Files\Resolware\Fileaze”, then any command issued by Fileaze will need to be in the same directory unless you don’t specify its full path. Moving commands around is seldom a good idea because they could depend on external files and libraries so we suggest to specify the full path to the command line tool you’re invoking. In case of the rar.exe command, the full path could be something like “C:\Program Files\WinRAR\rar.exe” and you’ll need to type it entirely, just saying “rar.exe” won’t find the tool and the job will fail!

On to the options we need on the command line. Suppose you want to add files to the RAR archive “C:\backup.rar” without including the original files’ paths in the archive. For this, we need to pass rar.exe the ‘a’ command and the ‘-ep’ switch.

Note: Rar.exe is very flexible and powerful and it supports a huge number of commands and switches. For a complete list consult the rar.exe help on the command line

The command line with options would then be

C:\Program Files\WinRAR\rar.exe a -ep c:\backup.rar

but it still lacks the last parameter: the filename to add to the archive. Being a batch job, the RAR command will run for all files found in the sources so we need to pass a different filename at every invocation of the command. This is easily done by entering %FILENAME% as the filename parameter at the end of the command line: this variable will be substituted with the current filename at every invocation of the command and the filename will be automatically enclosed in double quotes to prevent problems with paths containing spaces.

The complete command line then is:

C:\Program Files\WinRAR\rar.exe a -ep c:\backup.rar %FILENAME%

and we can use it to create our action.

Just create the action as usual, selecting Command as the action type

and fill in the parameters in the action editor:

You’re done. Save the action and the job, run the job and after it finishes the backup.rar file will be created in the destination folder (C:\ in our case):

Opening the file with WinRAR shows what we expected:

On the same line, you can create batch decompression jobs (for example to automatically unpack RAR archives residing in multiple folders) or mix the command action with the FTP/email capabilities or archive bit techniques you learned of in the previous tutorials, including scheduling the job for unattended operation even without Fileaze running.

Please download the latest version at the usual location (http://www.fileaze.com/download/) and install it over the existing one without uninstalling the older version first.

Here’s what’s new:

• First we fixed a bug that occurred when uploading to FTP servers entire folder trees (when the “Keep folder structure” option was enabled in folder sources). Thanks to Rob van der Woude for spotting this out!
• Talking about folder and FTP sources, we added an option to keep or avoid the creation of the first/root folder when the “Keep folder structure” option is enabled. Disabling this is particularly useful for uploads to webservers where the destination directory is usually different from your local directory (for example you have files in c:\mywebsite and want to upload to /foo and not /foo/mywebsite).
• In addition, we added the possibility to exclude multiple (sub)folders from a folder source. This was asked by bigbew in a previous post and it’s there now. It can speed things up considerably when dealing with huge folders.
• Again on the performance side, we added a checkbox to disable the realtime display of the log when a job is running: jobs running on thousands of files can run many times faster when the log is disabled!
• Finally, we added the online tutorials to the help files. We suggest all new users to read through them to fully understand how Fileaze works in the shortest time.

We invite everyone to update. Just download and install over the existing installation, without uninstalling first.

Have fun!