Re: DOS Type into a variable

Douglas -

Thanks for checking this out. I wrote a VB program to read the file. I was
trying to shoehorn an existing process into a different use, and thought
that using this type of redirection would be the easiest. DOS sure isn't a
shell script. Thanks for the help.

- Michael

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Douglas Handy <dhandy@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Michael,

commandfileb.cmd wants the contents of filea.txt as a parameter, like to
use

it as %1 in commandfileb.cmd. I thought I tried the commandfileb.cmd <
filea.txt technique and it didn't work...

It won't work either, if commandfileb.cmd wants the *contents* of the file
as a parameter. Like your pipe method, it would still require
commandfileb.cmd to accept the data via stdin instead of a parm.

I take it you have no control over modifying commandfileb.cmd to either use
stdin, or read a file named as an argument? What is invoking this whole
process? Can you change it to read filea.txt and create the command string
to get executed?

If not, you might be able to do something like this::

Set /p data= < filea.txt
commandfileb.cmd %data%

The SET command with /p tells it to set the contents of environment
variable
data from prompted input. Then we don't name a prompt string, and use <
filea.txt to redirect stdin to supply the value to the SET command. Then
you can use %data% in subsequent commands to act as a parm.

But will filea.txt always contain a single line of data? Will it have
embedded blanks? If there are embedded blanks you may need:

Set /p data= < filea.txt
commandfileb.cmd "%data%"

If there can be more than one line of data in filea.txt, you really should
have commandfileb.cmd able to read the file directly or accept input via
stdin so you can pipe data into it. It still isn't clear to me what
commandfileb.cmd should be doing or why it can't read filea.txt itself.

Doug
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