Title : Enumerations on the Dos command line
Author: Daniel Trembath, 12 July 2002
Edited: same

Keywords: enumeration batch files advanced dos

Ok ok, enumerations is a little excessive a title.

Every wanted to write a batch file, or run a command in DOS that affected every file in a directory? Try using a 'for' loop.

for %i in (*.txt) do aCommand %i

This is a for loop that will get every file that matches the pattern *.txt (text files in this case) and will 'do' the aCommand (whatever command you like) to it.


So say if you wanted output the content all the text files in a directory you might run:

c:\somedir\>type aFile.txt
c:\somedir\>type bFile.txt
c:\somedir\>type cFile.txt

you can instead run:

c:\somedir\>for %i in (*.txt) do type %i


Now of course you could have just as easily typed:

c:\somedir\>type *.log

But that's not nearly as fun. And its also a bad example. This will come in handy :)


Cheers

Daniel