BASH Backquote equivalence in cmd.exe? 1

[rayen99]

Does anybody know the command substitution syntax for the windows command line? Or is there not one?

 

[hughessoft]

Do you mean how do you get to the dos prompt?

if so - Start Run, CMD or command or comand.com will
work.

cheers

 

[rayen99]

Thanks, but yeah I don't mean that. I want to substitute the output of one command as a parameter of another. For example in the BASH shell you could type something like "rm `cat del.txt`" and if the contents of del.txt were "number.txt" and number.txt was in the current folder it would be deleted.

 

[billieT]

If your output is going to a file, then you can read the output using for /f and run commands against it. It's a bit of a gnarly command for getting the syntax right, but here's reading from a file with a single parameter per line:

FOR /F &quot;eol=; tokens=1* delims= &quot; %i in (myfile.txt) do <command> %i

If you run it from a batch, those variables need double percent signs ie: %%i. Substitute <command> for the actual command. The %i is a convention - if you have more than one token/parameter per line, they become %j, %k, etc etc

You can capture output directly from a command and use it to execute something too:

FOR /F &quot;usebackq delims==&quot; %i IN (`<command>`) DO <anothercommand> %i

I suggest you run help for in the command prompt and see all the gubbins it goes on about...


PS. And if you need to really convoluted processing of the input/output, I suggest you just use Perl ;-)

 

[rayen99]

Thanks a lot for the help billieT. Hmm I figured there would be an easier way to do that, but hey your method works. Awesome, thanks again.