I have tried prefixing lines with semicolons, 'REM', etc.. but no matter what when I run my batch file I keep getting "unknown command REM whatever"
"REM test" It is not recognized, and it is windows vista. I simply get "rem" output back to my console.
That's entirely normal behavior. Batch files are simply sequences of commands that are run one after another. So every line will get output to the console as if it were typed there.
H:\>echo rem test > test.cmd
H:\>test
yields the output
H:\>rem test
as if I typed rem test directly to the console.
You can suppress this by either prefixing the line with #:
#rem test
or by including echo off in the batch file:
#echo off
rem test
If I put ":: test" and execute it I get back "Test".
Can't reproduce here.
If I put "; test" it recursively executes itself
A semicolon at the start of the line seemingly gets ignored.
If you're talking about cmd.exe batch files under Windows, you can use:
rem this method or
:: this method.
For bash and a lot of other UNIX-type shells, you use:
# this method.
I'm pretty certain you're not using cmd.exe since that would give you an error like:
'rem' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
rather then:
Unknown command ...
If you are using a UNIX-type shell, the # character is almost certainly what you're after. If you let us know exactly the shell you're using, we can probably help out further.
you probably created an UNICODE file. These files contain 2 bytes header named BOM
which is not shown by any editor but cmd attempts to execute them and fails.
To make sure this is indeed an issue: type any other command at the very beginning
of your file and see it throws the same error - for example #echo test
To fix it, just create a new plain text file and copy content of the original file there.
then remove the original file and replace it by the newly created one.
In my case the problems are line endings. Somehow Maven or the Jenkins pipeline running on a Linux machine changed the line endings from Windows style (CR LF) to Unix style (LF). Changing them back solves the issue for me.
Related
I have a text file with lots of commands in it and I want to sent those commands to a software called thermocal. It is a console application. I found the command below, but it doesn't work for me.
Do I need to put this .exe file in the same folder of the batch file to make it work or any thing else?
type somefile.txt | Thermocal.exe
Batch scripts can be considered as a collection of lines you could also type in a command line prompt one after another. With respect to this it might be helpful for you, to play with cmd in order to get a feeling for what is happening.
About starting thermocal: Assuming thermocal is not part of PATH then the batch file either needs to change the current directory to the one with termocal.exe. Alternatively you might be able to call thermocal.exe with adding a path like C:\ProgramFiles\Thermocal\thermocal.exe . Play with cmd to find out, what works and what doesn't
When you are able to start thermocal from the command line prompt window, you can start experimenting with the call. You will probably end of with something like this in your command line window:
C:\ProgramFiles\Thermocal> thermocal argument1 argument 2
If this works, you can start with batch programming :)
Assuming your arguments are stored in somefile.txt like this:
argument1 argument 2
TYPE does nothing more than printing a file:
TYPE somefile.txt
Now you need to use the result of the output as command line arguments:
for /f %%i in ('type somefile.txt') do (thermocal.exe %%i)
Here is the situation. I need to "type" a .sj files content, then save it as an .js file. This is not the same as a rename, as the encoding is different. I am very new to Batch File syntax, but proficient with other programming languages. Here is what I have tried:
call for %%i in (.\*.js) do type %%i > %%i.js
But this is giving me the "%%i is unexpected at this time" Error.
If you need me to provide more insight, I will be happy to.
BACKGROUND: Trying to use JSDoc3 on .sj files but the encoding is not compatible. Using an encoder did not work either. What did work is copying and pasting the contents into a new file with encoding UTF8. But like I stated, a program like UTFCast did not work.
Two percent signs without anything in between (in a batch file) are treated like a single percent sign in a command (not a batch file).
Moreover CALL command enables a user to execute a batch file from within another batch file.
So from cmd you need to run only below..
for %i in (.\*.js) do type %i > %i.js
if you want to learn more...
for command
call command
I have a demo.txt file. I need to delete content in that file using a batch file. Please tell me the command to delete content for demo.txt file.
break>demo.txt
Try this.it will set an empty file on the place of demo.txt. As break is internal command that does nothing it should be pretty fast.Also the break command can produce output only with /? argument so this makes this method pretty robust.
Command Prompt:
break>c:\'file directory'\demo.txt
PowerShell:
Clear-Content c:\'file directory'\demo.txt
type nul > demo.txt
works and also works in JPSoft's TakeCommand TCC.EXE command shell (where "break" will output "BREAK is ON" rather than nothing as it does in Microsoft CMD.EXE)
The general idea is to find a command that outputs Nothing and redirect that to the file using >
This seems most intuitive to me:
copy /y nul demo.txt
NOTE: Unfortunately, like the other methods provided here, this fails if demo.txt is currently in use by another process. In such a case it is sometimes possible to open the file in a text editor and delete all the contents, even though the file is in use. I don't know of a way to do this from the command line.
If the file is used by another application command prompt redirection may fail (as it requires more file access then necessary). In that case you can use powershell:
PS> Set-Content file.txt $null
Note: do not expect that it will allow access to exclusively opened files.
The Windows batch file I am trying to run contains the following assignment:
set ANT_HOME="C:/Program Files/apache-ant-1.8.4"
The offending line is:
call %ANT_HOME%/bin/ant -f ../config/common.xml start_db
And when I run the script with echo on I get:
call "C:/Program_Files/apache-ant-1.8.4"/bin/ant -f ../config/common.xml start_db
Files/apache-ant-1.8.4""=="" was unexpected at this time.
I've moved the second quote to to the end of the path, after the ant, but I receive the same error message.
If ant were an .exe I would say your code should work. But I suspect that ant is a batch file, and the error is occurring within the ant script.
I base my conclusion on your error message - specifically the following portion of it: ""=="". The error message is a batch parsing error, and I don't see how your code could generate those characters. So I figure ant must be a batch script that is causing the problem.
I suspect ant.bat has #echo off at the top, so you are not seeing the actual line that is failing.
Not having access to the ant.bat script, I couldn't possibly diagnose exactly what is failing, nor can I guess on how to fix it.
Update - exact problem found
I found a copy of ant.bat online.
It has the following line of code within:
if "%ANT_HOME%"=="" set ANT_HOME=%DEFAULT_ANT_HOME%
Your definition of ANT_HOME includes enclosing quotes, so the code is trying to execute
if ""C:/Program Files/apache-ant-1.8.4""=="" set ANT_HOME=%DEFAULT_ANT_HOME%
The space is not quoted, and you have your error.
All you need to do to fix everything is to remove the quotes from the definition of ANT_HOME, and then add quotes to your CALL statement:
set "ANT_HOME=C:/Program Files/apache-ant-1.8.4"
call "%ANT_HOME%/bin/ant" -f ../config/common.xml start_db
Forward-slashes are not always reliable as folder delimiters within Windows. See Why does the cmd.exe shell on Windows fail with paths using a forward-slash ('/'') path separator?.
Better to use back-slashes.
set "ANT_HOME=C:\Program Files\apache-ant-1.8.4"
call "%ANT_HOME%\bin\ant" -f ..\config\common.xml start_db
The quotes have to completely surround a file name. You can't use them for partial names. Try this instead:
set ANT_HOME=C:\Program Files\apache-ant-1.8.4
call "%ANT_HOME%\bin\ant" -f ../config/common.xml start_db
Oh, and I changed some of your slashes to backslashes (DOS doesn't like forward slashes). I assume you are allowed to use / in that parameter you are passing though.
I am just starting to get a handle on batch programming.
To date, I've been copy/pasting into the MS-DOS command prompt from a text editor. Some of these copy pastes are getting large. Im sure there is a better way to go about this, ie. writing a line in command prompt that calls other text files (effectively doing the work of copy pasting).
Are these external files going to be .bat (which are just text that could also be put directly into the command prompt?) or .txt or something else?
I am mainly looking into this so that I can get into reusing code and getting into looping.
Are there any tutorials someone would recommend to get my acquainted with these topics?
Thanks for any help.
You can name a text file .bat or .cmd (the latter if you know it's only usable as a Windows batch file) and put commands into it, line by line.
You can run such files by typing their name at the command prompt when you're in the directory where they reside (or if they are contained in one of the PATH directories).
By default the behavior will match pretty much exactly with what you would type by hand. You'll see what commands are executed as well as their output. For example the following batch file (saved as test.cmd here)
echo Hello World
dir /b *.cmd
yields the following output when run
> echo Hello World
Hello World
> dir /b *.cmd
date.cmd
foo.cmd
test.cmd
x.cmd
y.cmd
You can suppress the output of the command being run by including the line
echo off
in your batch file. Prefix it with an # to suppress command output for that line in particular, but ever subsequent command won't be echoed:
#echo off
If other concrete questions arise, feel free to ask.