Looking For A Good Registry Tool

[Veazer]

I need a registry tool that can do the following:

1. Backup specified keys, if they exist, and store them to a backup file. I'd like to specify the keys from a text file list.
   
2. Apply a list of registry values to the registry. This step can be done with regedit easily, so i'm not bothered if the app can't.
   
3. Restore the registry values backed up in step 1
   

A command line app is preferred, I need an app that can do this via scripts. It cannot require an user intervention. An app that can run 'silently' with command switches would be fine too.

Specifically, I'm trying to create a startup script on my usb drive that associates all OO filetypes and MS Office filetypes with PortableOpenOffice on my thumbdrive. I want MS Office files to open with OpenOffice while the drive is in place, but i definitely need to restore the file associations to MS Office in my shutdown file.

[Guest Reimar]

All answers to your qustions could be found at google.com

[Veazer]

All answers to your qustions could be found at google.com

Where? I've found tools to backup entire hives, tools to read specific registry keys, but nothing that does quite what I'm looking for.

[Guest Reimar]

Veazer did you realize that you talking from thousands of text lines?

If you want to safe some entries from the Registry you have to do it manually entriy for entry.

To save you can do it with an plain wordprocessor like Notepad and save the file with extension .reg.

On this way you can start to create your own Database of Registry entries and can just add them as you need.

It's an easy way to do but requires a lot hours!

I think a program what all the things can do what you looking for may not exist. If you able to program in let bsay Visual C++ or so, may you start to write your own program. And if it's work, may you can even sell it! Who knows?!

[Tywais]

If you look at the command line options for regedit you can put together a script fairly easily to do this with a .bat file.

http://www.robvanderwoude.com/regedit.html

http://www.ss64.com/nt/regedit.html

And MS Scripting methods > http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x05fawxd.aspx

You can use the 'findstr' command in the batch file to locate position of strings. Or the DOS 'find' command.

The above are 'old school' methods but will work. Easy enough to write something in VisualC or Visual Basic to do it also using APIs.

[Veazer]

...Veazer did you realize that you talking from thousands of text lines? ....

Yeah, i've already created the whole list of registry replacements. It is very long, like you said, more than 3,300 lines. I just used WinMerge to check the differences of the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hive before and after an OpenOffice installation.

The easiest backup method, I think, would have been to backup the entire HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hive before applying my changes and later restore it when removing the usb drive. This would be a bit slower than necessary because it would be replacing a lot of reg entries than hadn't changed and didn't need to be restored.

Thankfully, I don't need to do any of that any more. I just found a portable app today called C.A.F.E. that runs in the background and uses alternate file associations pre-programmed by the user. It's better than my solution because there's not the risk of messing up the registry on the host machine. You can toggle it to be enabled or disabled with a double-click on the tray icon and easily shutdown when done with it.

Thanks Tywais and Reimar for your suggestions. If you use portable apps and want to easily open data and documents with your own apps you might give the C.A.F.E. app a try.