FOR
Type: Internal (2.0 and later)
Syntax:
FOR %%(variable) IN set DO (command)
or for interactive processing
FOR %%(variable) IN set DO (command)
Purpose: Performs repeated execution of commands (for both batch
processing and interactive processing).
Discussion
%% variable can be any character.
set can be one or more file specifications.
The %%variable is set sequentially to each of the set entries. Then the
DOS
command specified after the DO is carried out. Typically set will
include
wildcard characters (? and *) to indicate a group of filenames. Then,
%%variable is set to each matching filename. You can also use path
designations
for set.
This command provides a way to repeat DOS commands in a predetermined way
(usually to tell DOS to carry out a command on each of the files named in
the
set specifications).
Any character except 0 through 9 can be used for %%variable (to avoid
confusion
with the %0-%9 batch parameters).
For more information on FOR and other batch commands, see Chapter 5,
Using Batch Files.
Example
To TYPE (display) the contents of every file in the current directory
that has
the filename extension TXT, enter
for %%X in (*.txt) do type %%X
If the program finds files on the disk that have the TXT extension, the
command
sets %%X to each of the TXT files, then displays the contents of each
file.
Back to the
Easy DOS
Command Index