Windows batch file commands and variables

Question

I'm not sure whether it is possible, but what I need is a plain bat/cmd file that runs on windows 7 and does such things:

Step 1. findstr - it should find a specific string using regular expressions engine. Suppose we're looking for a number enclosed in tags <id>123</id> (suppose such a file is unique, so one value is returned). The command would print 123 to the screen, but I need to save it in a variable (don't know how).

Step 2. Another call to findstr on another directory. Now we want to find a file NAME (/m option) containing the value that we saved on Step 1 (in another group of files i.e. another directory). And again, save the result (name of the file) in a variable. Say, file_123.txt matches the criteria.

Step 3. Copy the file that we got as a result of the second findstr call (file_123.txt) to another location.

The whole question turns around the point about how to save the result of windows commands to variables to be able to provide these values to subsequent commands as parameters.

Joey · Accepted Answer · 2011-06-08 10:36:49Z

3

The general way of getting command output in variables is

for /f %%x in ('some command') do set Var=%%x

(with various variations, depending on context and what exactly is desired).

As for your steps, I elaborate after lunch. There are some intricacies.

answered Jun 8, 2011 at 10:36

Joey

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Anthony Miller · Accepted Answer · 2011-06-23 17:17:47Z

0

Step 1:

FOR /F "USEBACKQ tokens=1-20 delims=<>" %%A in (`FINDSTR "123" "path of file to search in"`) DO (
 SET var=%%B
)

ECHO %var%

Understand that delims will change depending on what 'separates' the parts of the output (whether its a space, a special character, etc.)

Step 2 & 3:

FOR /F "USEBACKQ tokens=*" %%A IN (`DIR "Path" /A ^| FIND /I "%var%"`) DO (
 COPY /Y "%%A" "C:\New\Path\%%~nxA"
)

answered Jun 23, 2011 at 17:17

Anthony Miller

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