Printing the Registry

Regedit has a feature that prints all or part of the registry. I confess that I've never printed anything in the registry; I just haven't found a good reason to do it. You can certainly print subkeys as a backup before making changes, but I tend to use hive files for that purpose, which doesn't require me to retype keys, values, and data to restore the old settings. You might not get much use out of this feature, but this chapter wouldn't be complete without describing how to use it. To print all or part of the registry, follow these steps:

  1. Click the key you want to print, keeping in mind that you're going to print every subkey and value under it.

  2. On the File menu, click Print to display the Print dialog box, shown in Figure 2-4.

    click to expand
    Figure 2-4: The format of Regedit's printer output is the same as the format that Regedit uses when exporting portions of the registry to a text file.

  3. Do one of the following:

    • To print the entire registry, click All.

    • To print the selected branch, click Selected Branch.

  4. Click Print.

The following listing shows you what Regedit's printer output looks like. As you see, it's not very useful except maybe as a temporary way to remember values. Still, Microsoft greatly improved Regedit's printer output for Windows XP. Regedit now prints REG_DWORD values so they look like REG_DWORD values, rather than printing them as binary values in little-endian format (see Chapter 1, "Learning the Basics"). It also prints binary values along with their ASCII-equivalent text. Last, this version of Regedit actually prints each value's type rather than relying on you to figure it out while you're flipping through pages.

Listing 2-1: Sample Printer Output

start example

         Key Name:          HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup         Class Name:        <NO CLASS>         Last Write Time:   1/2/2002 - 1:16 AM         Value 0           Name:            SetupType           Type:            REG_DWORD           Data:            0x0         Value 1           Name:            SystemSetupInProgress           Type:            REG_DWORD           Data:            0x0         Value 2           Name:            CmdLine           Type:            REG_SZ           Data:         Value 3           Name:            SystemPrefix           Type:            REG_BINARY           Data:         00000000   cd 03 00 00 00 80 3c d2 - Í.....<Ò         Value 4           Name:            SystemPartition           Type:            REG_SZ           Data:            \Device\HarddiskVolume1         Value 5           Name:            OsLoaderPath           Type:            REG_SZ           Data:            \ 

end example



Microsoft Windows XP Registry Guide
Microsoft Windows XP Registry Guide (Bpg-Other)
ISBN: 0735617880
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 185

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