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Hi Jeb! Thanks for replying. I read about the self-executing labels again. I think it’s starting to sink in. The less than in <:%bl.start% was confusing me. Now I get it. It has to be there to trick the parser into treating the line as a command and not a label, but goto treats labels literally and ...

Hi Again! I was thinking of writing a subroutine that would do different things depending on the name it was called by. Pretty soon, it had a long list of labels before the main body of the subroutine. I was wondering if it’s possible to have multiple labels on the same line using some twisted trick...

Hello All! I keep coming across lines of code like this: <nul set /p ".=some text" Why is there a dot before the equals sign? What does it do? It doesn’t seem to make any difference whether I leave it in or not. Is it for good luck? Does it keep the bugs away? Seriously, I presume it’s the...

Hi Squashman! That was you? Should have guessed. I tried googling, but the words more“” and “bug” are too common and I couldn’t sift through all the results. Thanks for the link… btw, what is Ed talking about in that thread? Near as I can tell, he’s trying to output a range of lines from a file. Did...

Dear Batchers,

It was recently discovered that more will wait for a keypress after 65,535 lines, even if output is redirected to a file or sent down a pipe. But who was the first to report this bug? Is there a link to a post on a forum somewhere? I couldn’t find anything.

- SB

Hi Websec!

Have a look at abc0502’s program in the last user posted on forum topic. You should be able to modify his code to suit your needs. If you run into any more problems, feel free to post a question here, but I don’t know much about VBScript. Good luck!

- SB

Hi Carlos! Borrowing from Walid2mi’s technique for splitting a CRLF pair (see seventh answer), and Jeb’s explanation of how newline variable hack works , I came up with this… @echo off & setlocal enableextensions set lftmp=%tmp%\lf.tmp echo(| (pause >nul & findstr "^" >%lftmp%) <nu...

Hello All! Herbert Kleebauer recently posted this article on the alt.msdos.batch.nt newsgroup. He demonstrates how to filter out all control characters and extended ASCII characters from an input file using the wondrous certutil. The possibilities for certutil are endless. It’s my new favourite toy....

Hello All! Came across a post about swapping values by Joey recently. Haven’t seen anything similar elsewhere so I thought I’d share it with you. Try this out: set "fruitA=apples" & set "fruitB=bananas" set fruit set "fruitA=%fruitB%" & set "fruitB=%fruitA%...

Greetings! I read an interesting Experts Exchange topic . Search for the Goto Issue section. The example given by Qlemo goes something like this: set fruit=apples if 1==1 ( echo(%fruit% set fruit=bananas goto nextline :nextline echo(%fruit% ) Pretty cool, huh? But wait, it gets better! I thought thi...

Thanks Squashman! Good find.

Hello All! Good news for those who don't have forfiles on their systems: MVP Daniel Petri wrote an article on the Windows 2000 Resource Kit that contains download links to many of the tools in said kit, including forfiles. But the link is to an early release that doesn't do the hex escapes. Fortunat...

Oops! I checked and find can output Unicode and findstr can't. But find is no good either because it appends CR+LF to output. Sorry about that... Can type work with Unicode files from a cmd /u subshell? I seem to recall some discussion about this before, but of course I can't remember when or where....

Hi Jeb and welcome back. Brilliant workaround for the "echo without linefeed" problem. Wish I'd thought of it! I had thought of using copy /a, but I didn't know how to get rid of the CtrlZ at eof. Never occurred to me to combine it with the /b switch for the destination file. One tiny sugg...

Hi Again! I've written a program to copy a line from a text file and save it to a new file. It uses more, findstr, and temporary files to do the heavy lifting so it should work for lines >8191 characters. I won't include the program here because much of the code is similar to my previous effort. But...