Why does piping cause delayed expansion?

[Queue]

A simple example:

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set A=B
echo %%A%%
echo|echo %%A%%
echo|echo %%%%A%%%%

outputs:

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%A%
B
%B%

(echo| could be any command that doesn't make cmd.exe abort or output to stderr, like cd;.|, type nul|, etc.)

The third output line confuses me; why doesn't it output %A%?

Queue

[Squashman]

Read Jeb's explanation of how the cmd parser works.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4094 ... 33#4095133

[jeb]

Read Jeb's explanation of how the cmd parser works.

Will not help here, as this part isn't expained there.

But this question is nearly the same (or better, the answer is the same)
Why does delayed expansion fail when inside a piped block of code?

The behaviour looks very strang here, but if you know the cause it's obvoius

Both sides of a pipe are executed in a new cmd.exe context.
And both sides are executed like a command at the command prompt, that is important, as executing commands at the command prompt are handled different than commands in batch files.
(Ok at this point the parser explanation could be helpful).

Effectivly there are two phases in you examples.

The first phase is in the batch file, the standard percent expansion rules.

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anyCmd | echo Test2 %%A%%
anyCmd | echo Test3 %%%%A%%%%
->
anyCmd | echo Test2 %A%
anyCmd | echo Test3 %%A%%

The next phase is the percent expansion at the command prompt in the new cmd.exe context.
And here the percent expansion works different, as in batch files.

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echo Test2 %A%
echo Test3 %%A%%
->
echo Test2 B
echo Test3 %B%

The expansion in test3 looks strange, but it's normal at the command prompt.

Hope it helps

jeb

PS: btw. what a luck for me, that Dave isn't online now, so I had the time to answer an interesting question

[dbenham]

PS: btw. what a luck for me, that Dave isn't online now, so I had the time to answer an interesting question

Too funny

[Queue]

Ah ha! Thanks. I hadn't quite put 2 and 2 together; particularly, I hadn't grasped in what way it'd mix both batch and cmd parsing.

I've been referencing your guys' work (particularly on stackoverflow) for what feels like years at this point, but only recently realized this was where a good bit of batch experimenting went on.

Queue