libwab - Windows Command-line Help

This page is for Windows users who wish to use libwab but are unfamiliar with the command-line.

Example

Setup

1. Download the current wabread mingw zip file (you can find it on the libwab homepage).
2. Extract the contents to a new folder C:\wabwork>.
3. Locate your .wab file(s). You can do this by clicking Start->search->"For Files or Folders" and entering "*.wab" in "Search for files or folders named".
4. Copy your .wab file(s) into C:\>wabwork
5. Go to "Start->Run", enter cmd.exe and press enter.
6. You should now be in a DOS window like the following (there may be differences)
   

   Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195]
   (C) Copyright 1985-2000 Microsoft Corp.
   
   C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>
   

7. Go to C:\wabwork
   

   C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>c:
   C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>cd \wabwork
   C:\wabwork>
   

8. Run dir to make sure everything is there:
   

   C:\wabwork>dir
    Volume in drive C has no label.
    Volume Serial Number is F8C2-A937
   
    Directory of C:\wabwork
   
   08/05/2006  12:01p      <DIR>          .
   08/05/2006  12:01p      <DIR>          ..
   05/27/2003  10:16p             244,179 example.wab
   08/02/2006  04:25p             935,399 libiconv-2.dll
   08/02/2006  04:26p             111,180 wabread.exe
                  3 File(s)      1,290,758 bytes
                  2 Dir(s)  20,292,921,344 bytes free
   
   C:\wabwork>
   

   You should have
   • the wabread executable.
   • The libiconv-2.dll
   • The wabfile(s) you wish to decode.
   Note: wabread.exe may be named wabread-060803.exe (or similarily). You can rename this file to wabread.exe with ren wabread-060803.exe wabread.exe

Executing wabread

• If you run the wabread executable then you should see something like this:
  

  C:\wabwork>wabread
  Use:  wabread [options] <filename.wab>
  
    Options:
     -d #        set debugging (logical or 1,2,3,4...)
     -h          heuristic record dump: attempt to recover data
                   from a broken .wab file and/or deleted records.
     -u          enable unicode (a bit unstable under win32)
  
  C:\wabwork>
  

• To decode example.wab we do the following:
  

  C:\wabwork>wabread example.wab >example.ldif
  

  The file "example.ldif" should now contain the records from example.wab in ldif form.
• If you wish to get deleted records back from example.wab or the example.wab file is damaged then you can use heuristic mode:
  

  C:\wabwork>wabread -h example.wab >example-heuristic.ldif
  

  The above should result in the file "example-heuristic.ldif" being generated. This file will contain everything that wabread finds in your .wab file that seems like it is a record.

Why Command-line?

GUI (graphical user interface) users often believe that the command-line to archaic. The truth is that the command-line is, in many ways, far more powerful than a GUI.

What if you wanted to decode a wab file every day at a certain time? How could this be done with a GUI? With the wabread executable one could schedule the command to be run automatically. But that's just the beginning.

How about if there were several hundred or even thousands of .wab files to decode? Using bash one could do the following:

% for i in *.wab; do wabread $i >$i.ldif;done

One could even pipe the output from that command to an ldap server running on a different machine.

% (for i in *.wab; do wabread $i;done)| ssh user@ldap-server ldap_read_ldif_command -