Artsy Ken, AKA Ken Lee's Photography »Sample Script - Convert a text file to a system variable
When running a batch script there are times when you want to take the output of a utility and/or file and convert it to a system variable. Batch was not designed for this, but there's an easy way to do it....
In this example, we'll take a line of output from Systernals PSInfo.exe and convert it to a variable.
::REM ------------------ start batch sample script -------------------------------
::REM by John D. Seaman, www.japan-page.net/batch
::REM Call www.systernals.com psinfo.exe, put results in a text file
::REM Get output from psinfo to text file "_out.txt"
psinfo.exe >_out.txt
::REM Use find, isolate the Product Version line
type _out.txt | find "Product version:" _out2.txt
::REM Create a loop, grab the 2nd field (AKA the version)
::REM Tokens states we're looking at 2 values (and grabbing the second)
::REM Delims states break the string at the colon
::REM If you call this directly from the command line, change %%i below to %i.
for /f "tokens=1,2* delims=:" %%i in (_out.txt) do set var=%j
echo Your new variable VAR is %var%
::REM ------------------ end batch sample script -------------------------------
So, a simple for loop takes a value from a text file and converts this into a variable. What can you do with this? I have run some rather complex scripts such as dumping every workstation name in a 3000 user environment from AD, then calling a script against all the workstations to do some maintenance - check AV signatures in an outbreak, scan for disk space, verify a service is running, etc. With the for loop, you can process each machine, find the value your looking for, then dump the results into a log file or continue processing based on the result.
You can also use a 3rd party text manipulator such as SED (a GNU *Nix tool), or my old fav TextTools32 (t.exe), but the above trick will let you do it from the native windows command line.
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