qtools

qtools is an MSMQ administration and operation toolkit.

With qtools you'll be able to perform both deployment and ongoing operation actions pretty easily -- modeled

after the UNIX phylosophy:

__Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle

text streams, because that is a universal interface__

In practice the qtools are mostly conforming to that model.

The Tools

• qls - list queues. This is an enabler of pipe operations when you want to run batch commands.
• qcount - count messages in a queue.
• qcp - copy queue content to another queue.
• qgrep - grep-like tool for searching inside queue messages.
• qrm - remove a queue
• qtail - tail a queue (show contents and a live message feed)
• qtouch - create a queue
• qtruncate - truncate (empty a queue)

Most of the tools try to rely on their UNIX counterparts for name semantics.

An input is a queue path. If -n isn't required and you dont specify a queue path via -n you'll be prompted

for STDIN.

From what you'll see below, you might be finally able to throw away all of those pesky vbs, bat, and powershell scripts

:).

Quick Examples

Some of the things you can do with the tools as a collection or separately:

Creating a new transactional queue with full permissions for Everyone, a limit of 400KB. Not all

parameters are required.

qtouch -n .\private$\foo_q -p FullControl -u Everyone -l 400 -t

Creating a set of queues from a text file (as part of deployment for example). Note that I use MSYS/Mingw's cat to stream the text out.

# queues.txt  --snip-snip--
.\private$\xmltestqueue
.\private$\xmltestqueue


$ cat queues.txt | qtouch -p FullControl -u Everyone -l 400 -t

Counting number of messages in a single queue

$ qcount -n .\private$\xmltestqueue
OK: [.\private$\xmltestqueue] 3 message(s).

Counting number of messages in a list of queues (using qls with a pipe)

$ qls -f xmltest | qcount
OK: [.\private$\xmltestqueue] 3 message(s).
OK: [.\private$\xmltestqueue2] 0 message(s).

Removing, truncating and such in the same fasion (use qrm, qtruncate instead of qcount)

Grepping queue contents can be fun (you can also use qls to grep on several queues!):

$ qgrep.exe -n .\private$\xmltestqueue -e a
INFO: [.\private$\xmltestqueue] Listing results.
5/3/2011 7:11:40 PM     *** message id ***    foo:    f<a>sdf
5/3/2011 7:21:26 PM     *** message id ***    asdfadf:        <a>ef

Tailing a queue is also fun - you should see messages on the terminal as they're added to the queue:

$ qtail -n .\private$\foo_q

Even More

You should check out each command with its various switches. I've only covered a small subset of what you could do with qtools.

Output

The qtools output was adjusted to be easily parsable by regex or simple matchers (by position and tabs) so

that if needed, it can be piped to a monitoring or logging system.