How to pass arguments to a batch file

argumentsbatch-file

I need to pass an ID and a password to a batch file at the time of running rather than hardcoding them into the file.

Here's what the command line looks like:

test.cmd admin P@55w0rd > test-log.txt

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Another useful tip is to use %* to mean "all". For example:

echo off
set arg1=%1
set arg2=%2
shift
shift
fake-command /u %arg1% /p %arg2% %*

When you run:

test-command admin password foo bar

the above batch file will run:

fake-command /u admin /p password admin password foo bar

I may have the syntax slightly wrong, but this is the general idea.

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Windows – Batch file to delete files older than N days

Enjoy:

forfiles -p "C:\what\ever" -s -m *.* -d <number of days> -c "cmd /c del @path"

See forfiles documentation for more details.

For more goodies, refer to An A-Z Index of the Windows XP command line.

If you don't have forfiles installed on your machine, copy it from any Windows Server 2003 to your Windows XP machine at %WinDir%\system32\. This is possible since the EXE is fully compatible between Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP.

Later versions of Windows and Windows Server have it installed by default.

For Windows 7 and newer (including Windows 10):

The syntax has changed a little. Therefore the updated command is:

forfiles /p "C:\what\ever" /s /m *.* /D -<number of days> /C "cmd /c del @path"

Windows – How to you find and replace text in a file using the Windows command-line environment

A lot of the answers here helped point me in the right direction, however none were suitable for me, so I am posting my solution.

I have Windows 7, which comes with PowerShell built-in. Here is the script I used to find/replace all instances of text in a file:

powershell -Command "(gc myFile.txt) -replace 'foo', 'bar' | Out-File -encoding ASCII myFile.txt"

To explain it:

powershell starts up powershell.exe, which is included in Windows 7
-Command "... " is a command line arg for powershell.exe containing the command to run
(gc myFile.txt) reads the content of myFile.txt (gc is short for the Get-Content command)
-replace 'foo', 'bar' simply runs the replace command to replace foo with bar
| Out-File myFile.txt pipes the output to the file myFile.txt
-encoding ASCII prevents transcribing the output file to unicode, as the comments point out

Powershell.exe should be part of your PATH statement already, but if not you can add it. The location of it on my machine is C:\WINDOWS\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0

Update
Apparently modern windows systems have PowerShell built in allowing you to access this directly using

(Get-Content myFile.txt) -replace 'foo', 'bar' | Out-File -encoding ASCII myFile.txt

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Related Solutions

Windows – Batch file to delete files older than N days

Windows – How to you find and replace text in a file using the Windows command-line environment

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