RE: nt script

[Kevin Lange]

Title: RE: nt script

If you just do a HELP COMMAND, where command is the name of the command you need help on, you can find out as much as you really need to know about BATCH.

 

In your sample of  FOR /F "TOKENS=1,2*" %%A IN ('DATE/T') DO SET DATE=%%B

They were trying to set a variable called DATE based on the system date.

 

First of all , %%A should be %A and %%B should be %B if you are running this command in a command line.   If you place it in a batch file the way you have it, it will work.

 

First 2 values from the DATE/T command are placed in the variables %A and %B.  Then, for each line returned in this command (1), you set the variable DATE equal to the second returned value (%B).

 

For example, today the DATE/T returns 'Fri 03/07/2003".  Therefore, %A gets set to FRI and %B gets set to 03/07/2003.  When your command completes, the variable DATE will be equal to %B or 03/07/2003.

 

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This was determined by doing a help on the FOR command:

 

help for

 

FOR /F ["options"] %variable IN (file-set) DO command [command-parameters]
FOR /F ["options"] %variable IN ("string") DO command [command-parameters]
FOR /F ["options"] %variable IN ('command') DO command [command-parameters]

 

    or, if usebackq option present:

 

FOR /F ["options"] %variable IN (file-set) DO command [command-parameters]
FOR /F ["options"] %variable IN ('string') DO command [command-parameters]
FOR /F ["options"] %variable IN (`command`) DO command [command-parameters]

 

    filenameset is one or more file names.  Each file is opened, read
    and processed before going on to the next file in filenameset.
    Processing consists of reading in the file, breaking it up into
    individual lines of text and then parsing each line into zero or
    more tokens.  The body of the for loop is then called with the
    variable value(s) set to the found token string(s).  By default, /F
    passes the first blank separated token from each line of each file.
    Blank lines are skipped.  You can override the default parsing
    behavior by specifying the optional "options" parameter.  This
    is a quoted string which contains one or more keywords to specify
    different parsing options.  The keywords are:

 

        eol=c           - specifies an end of line comment character
                          (just one)
        skip=n          - specifies the number of lines to skip at the
                          beginning of the file.
        delims=xxx      - specifies a delimiter set.  This replaces the
                          default delimiter set of space and tab.
        tokens=x,y,m-n  - specifies which tokens from each line are to
                          be passed to the for body for each iteration.
                          This will cause additional variable names to
                          be allocated.  The m-n form is a range,
                          specifying the mth through the nth tokens.  If
                          the last character in the tokens= string is an
                          asterisk, then an additional variable is
                          allocated and receives the remaining text on
                          the line after the last token parsed.
        usebackq        - specifies that the new semantics are in force,
                          where a back quoted string is executed as a
                          command and a single quoted string is a
                          literal string command and allows the use of
                          double quotes to quote file names in
                          filenameset.