I have found that quite often I write a piece of VBA code and will end up calling third-party software from within VBA. Naturally this poses a problem if the VBA code is taken to a different machine and the software being called is not installed or can't be found by Windows. As kind of a sanity check I show below a small VBA function that tries to look for the tools "ls", "grep", and "awk" on a Windows machine (obviously these are Windows-ported GNU tools!), determines if they are callable from the command-line, and will exit the VBA code execution if any executable cannot be called.
The function
checkExeTools takes a string with the executables to be found seperated by semi-colons, omitting the .exe extension. The code is fairly explanatory and can be easily modified to suit individual needs.
' Check to see if required windows-ported linux tools are installed on system
' and are directly callable from cmd.exe (as part of the windows environment)
checkExeTools ("ls;grep;awk")
Private Sub checkExeTools(toolsSemicolonDelimited As String)
' Enable Miscrosoft Scripting Runtime via Tools -> References
' to use FileSystemObject
Dim FS As New FileSystemObject
Dim execCheck As String
execCheck = toolsSemicolonDelimited
Dim execFiles() As String
execFiles = Split(execCheck, ";")
Dim enviroPath As String
enviroPath = Environ("Path")
Dim execPaths() As String
execPaths = Split(enviroPath, ";")
Dim i As Integer
Dim j As Integer
Dim e As Boolean
' Must ensure all PATH enviro paths end in trailing "\"
' (Windows allows users to enter it with or without one)
For i = 0 To UBound(execPaths)
If Right(execPaths(i), 1) <> "\" Then
execPaths(i) = execPaths(i) + "\"
End If
Next
For j = 0 To UBound(execFiles)
e = False
For i = 0 To UBound(execPaths)
If FS.FileExists(execPaths(i) + execFiles(j) + ".exe") Then
e = True
End If
Next i
If e = False Then
MsgBox execFiles(j) + ".exe" + " is not installed.", vbExclamation, "Required Executable Missing"
End
End If
Next j
Set FS = Nothing
End Sub
