Re: DOS Type into a variable

[Michael Ryan <michaelrtr@xxxxxxxxx>]

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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