Windows script update hosts

Create account Log in. Twitter Facebook Github Instagram Twitch. Just find out powershell is a great shell for doing stuffs in windows 10 powershell is pre-installed since windows 8 What is hosts file: Hosts file is a file that maps hostnames to IP addresses. For example localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself. IsInRole [ Security. Upload image. Submit Preview Dismiss. In case the address changes, you still have the old host in the hosts file, thus Windows can't resolve to the new IP anyway except for a direct nameserver lookup , because the hosts file has the highest priority.

Chicken and egg. Here you go for a little IP lookup script. Beware, there is no error handling e. The script uses a specific nameserver for lookups, you may change that. I went for a tmpfile, you may work that out. Was just a bit easier to do it this way. We now need to put both together, just gimme me a sec. Didn't test the last part, but I'm sure that works. You need to get that repl. Findstr itself is capable of doing regex, but not able to replace.

Would be a mess to do in batch. I'm going to post a powershell equivalent to this script in a minute to show you how damn simple that is in comparsion. Sorry, but that is a terrible way to think for a person, much less some one working in IT where things change all the time. So it is up to him to decide. Thank you so much Thwr for both Batch and powershell and you make me think about powershell again.

A little analogy to get you started purly IMHO : Batch compares to PowerShell the same way a paperdart compares to a spacecraft with a fusion engine. To continue this discussion, please ask a new question. Which of the following retains the information it's storing when the system power is turned off? You won't be able to see any files in this directory because they aren't text documents.

To change the file type, click on the dropdown in the bottom right of the Open menu and click on "All Files":. Note that everything is commented out with characters, meaning that nothing is actually being read from the hosts file. Modern versions of Windows include a sort of DNS system already, so if you visit localhost it'll automatically redirect you to If you're doing some local development and are having problems with localhost, you can just remove the comments from your hosts file:.

Then, open PowerShell by pressing the Windows key, searching for "powershell", and clicking "Run as Administrator":. After that, you should be able to visit localhost in your browser and see whatever you're hacking on. If you're still having issues, try closing your browser completely, then open a new browser window and try again. Even though hosts files have fallen out of favor with newer systems like DNS, they still work for legacy reasons.

And hackers have definitely taken advantage of this in the past. What they would do is point a common website like google. This IP address could serve a site that looks just like Google's, but is actually trying to steal your sensitive information. While this was a problem in the past, most security software like the Windows Security Suite can recognize and fix problems with the hosts file automatically. That said, if you open up your hosts file and see a lot of strange entries, then you may want to revert to the default Windows hosts file.

Just copy and paste the default hosts file from earlier in the article into your hosts file and save. Note that some third-party security software uses the hosts file to block dangerous websites. If that's the case, no worries — your security software should add all those entries back to your hosts file. We'll go over how this works in the next section.

Don't want friends or family to visit certain websites on your computer? Or are you like me and get distracted by all the cat photos on the internet? Also, close the browser windows that are open and reopen them.

The one downside is that this only works on one device — you could just reach for your phone and browse Reddit on that instead.

Still, it's a neat way to create some friction on your work computer. This leads nicely into the last trick, which is to use the hosts file to make your life a little bit easier. If you spend a lot of time adjusting your router's settings, or you have a cool project running on a Raspberry Pi , you'll know that typing in a long IP address is a drag.

Instead, you can use the hosts file to make connecting to other devices on your local network much faster. For example, if your router is at Otherwise your browser might not recognize.

Fortunately there are a whole lot of valid TLDs nowadays. Again, the one downside to this method is that it only works on once device.