Windows Batch help in setting a variable from command output [duplicate]

Answer 1

It's not available in DOS, but in the Windows console, there is the for command. Just type 'help for' at a command prompt to see all of the options. To set a single variable you can use this:

for /f %%i in ('find .txt') do set file=%%i

Note this will only work for the first line returned from 'find .txt' because windows only expands variable once by default. You'll have to enable delayed expansion as shown here.

Answer 2

Here's a batch file which will return the last item output by find:

@echo off

ls | find ".txt" > %temp%\temp.txt
for /f %%i in (%temp%\temp.txt) do set file=%%i
del %temp%\temp.txt
echo %file%

for has a syntax for parsing command output, for /f "usebackq", but it cannot handle pipes in the command, so I've redirected output to a temporary location.

I strongly recommend, given that you have access to ls, that you consider using a better batch language, such as bash or even an scripting language like python or ruby. Even bash would be a 20x improvement over cmd scripting.