= OpenBinary: v1.0.1 Peter Jones [email protected]

== Notes

This is currently Windows-Only code!

OpenBinary is designed to simplify working with non-executable, binary files. This may include PDF, XLS*, PBI, DWG files, etc. If you need to automate opening one of these files (in a script, Taskfile, etc) OpenBinary can do it for you:

[source,shell]

OpenBinary path/to/FileToOpen.pdf

or

[source,shell]

OpenBinary C:\path\to\FileToOpen.pdf

At first glance it may seem to be a simple matter of using start filename.pdf at the command prompt. However, I found the need to develop this functionality when trying to automate opening a PowerBI file with an ampersand (and spaces) in the filename. I also needed to be able to do this while within a bash environment (specifically git-bash within VSCode!)

The ampersand in particular caused normal quoting (that worked for spaces) to misbehave, and it seemed impossible to achieve using CMD. Eventually I found that powershell could handle it where cmd could not.

I codified my solution into a Perl script, then decided it was more useful to have a compiled version. And ... here we are!

Even this version relies on powershell to get the job done.

At heart, the code looks like this:

[,go]

cmd := exec.Command("powershell.exe","-Command","start","'" + bfp + "'") cmd.Start()

As such, this will only work for machines running Windows with powershell available.