Creating a batch file on windows

It is well known that creating a batch file in Linux is an easy and enjoyable task, but right now I find myself in the necessity of automating some tasks on windows so I will need to learn how to do this on windows.

In windows batch files generally have a .bat extension, so I will start by creating a file: examplebatch.bat and trying a very simple command:

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dir

Now if I navigate to the folder where my batch file is (let’s say C:\Adrian\Batch) I can execute the batch file and the dir command will be executed:

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C:\Adrian\Batch>examplebatch.bat

C:\Adrian\Batch>dir
Volume in drive C is OSDisk
Volume Serial Number is C252-78D4

Directory of C:\Adrian\Batch
04/18/2012  08:42 PM    <DIR>          .
04/18/2012  08:42 PM    <DIR>          ..
04/18/2012  08:43 PM                 3 examplebatch.bat
               1 File(s)              3 bytes
               2 Dir(s)  186,052,022,272 bytes free

Easy so far. One useful thing to do is to add the folder where you are going to store all your batch files to your path (I won’t explain how to do this). This way you can just issue the command examplebatch and your examplebatch.bat script will be executed even if you are not currently in your batch folder.

There are a few interesting directives that I think will be useful when I am writing more advanced scripts. The @echo off directive tells the interpreter not to echo the commands executed from the batch. For example, if we modified examplebatch.bat to have this content:

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@echo off

dir

And we called it from our Batch folder we would see an output like this:

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C:\Adrian\Batch>examplebatch.bat
Volume in drive C is OSDisk
Volume Serial Number is C252-78D4

Directory of C:\Adrian\Batch
04/18/2012  08:42 PM    <DIR>          .
04/18/2012  08:42 PM    <DIR>          ..
04/18/2012  08:43 PM                 3 examplebatch.bat
               1 File(s)              3 bytes
               2 Dir(s)  186,052,022,272 bytes free

Note that this time we don’t see the dir command in the output.

Being a developer I am used to adding comments to my programs wherever I see necessity. Adding comments on batch files is possible. The downside is that the syntax feels a little weird. For every comment you have to start your line with the work REM:

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@echo off

REM This is a comment

dir

Another useful functionality is showing information to the user.To print something into the terminal can use the echo command:

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@echo off

REM This batch file just executed dir

echo I execute the dir command

dir

There is a lot more to say about creating batch files on windows, but I am going to leave it on this for today and I will try to show a more advanced example in another article.