Batch file piping output

Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. The Overflow Blog. Stack Gives Back Safety in numbers: crowdsourcing data on nefarious IP addresses.

Featured on Meta. New post summary designs on greatest hits now, everywhere else eventually. Related Hot Network Questions. Question feed. The Windows command processor does not have direct backquoting, but you can fake it by abusing the FOR command. The loop variable in the FOR command takes one percent sign if you are executing it directly from the command prompt, but two percent signs if you are executing it from a batch file.

By default, the FOR command sets the loop variable to the first word of each line. If you want to capture the entire line, you need to change the delimiter. There are other options for capturing say the first and third word or whatever. Since the program has only one line of output, the loop executes only once, and the result is that the directory is changed to the path that the printappdir program prints.

Exercise: What if you want to extract more than 26 words? Note also that the above script works only for US-English systems, since the phrase IPv4 Address will change based on your current language. Here's a list of special characters that can be escaped taken, and edited from Rob van der Woude's page. A bit off topic here, but this is very important! An unwanted caret escape at the end of the file could cause a memory leak! This command would leak all the memory, rendering the system completely unusable!

See here for more information. In find and findstr , there are some special characters that require some caution on it.