Hard Disk Serial Numbers & String shuffler

[Thomas McCarthy]

This rev list is great. Very helpful. So I want to make a small contribution. Recently there were some threads about serial numbers – getting them from disks and generating them to protect your work.
One mentioned taking a line and reversing it to help mask it. I recently made a code generator that goes one better, it takes the line and shuffles it: First, last, first last. It’s easy, just take the first char, delete it, the last char, delete it and add them to your new string.
De-shuffling requires building two strings and then putting them together. Here’s the decoder.

function decodeIt tregnum
--this will return a string in order
--i.e. from 51423 to 12345
  put tregnum into t
  put the num of chars in t into tlimit
  repeat with i = 1 to tlimit
    if i mod 2 > 0 then
      put the first char of t before t2b
    else
      put the first char of t after t2a
    end if
    delete the first char of t
  end repeat
  put t2a & t2b into tregnum
  return tregnum
end decodeIt


Ken Ray has some great stuff, naturally. However, some of his drive-serial number retrieval codes won’t work on non-English systems (because they try to match (English) strings) I’ve adapted some to look for “-“, a char in the serial number itself.
Here is a Mac/Win serial number function (the mac version is still “English-dependent”) and probably OSX only.

function driveNum
--Adapted from Ken Ray’s work
  switch (the platform)
  case "MacOS"
    put shell ("system_profiler SPIDEDataType") into x
      put lineoffset("Serial",x,20) into n –this is my brilliant contribution. Will skip the first drive (CD)
      put the last word of line (n + 20) of x into x
    if x <> 0 then
      return x
    else
      return "MacUser" – if all else fails
    end if
    break
  case "Win32"
    --returns the hard drives number
    put the first char of stackpath() into x –this is a function that returns the path ‘natch
    --answer x --drive letter
    -- Supports both "C", "C:" and "C:\" styles
    put x & ":" into pDisk
    set the hideConsoleWindows to true
    put shell("dir " & pDisk) into tDirData
    put lineoffset("-",tDirData) into x – another brilliant contribution, this will work on non English systems
    return the last word of line x of  tDirData
    break
  end switch
end driveNum


Sorry I don’t have enough time to keep up with this list! Very busy with a big project. I will probably be annoying the list with questions.
Cheers	
Tom Mccarthy


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