Occasionally, one gets in touch with kind of ‘foreign’ technologies and needs to get stuff working anyways.<\/p>\n
Recently, I had to do some various hacking with and around .bat files. Bat files are a kind of script files for Microsoft Windows.<\/p>\n
Calling external commands<\/strong><\/p>\n Imagine need to call some other command, let’s say git diff. So from a cmd thing, you would write<\/p>\n similar to writing shell scripts on unixes. But there is a catch. If the thing you want to call is another bat-script, just calling it ensures it ‘replaces’ the current script and never returns. So you need<\/p>\n if the command you want to run is a bat file and you want to return to your script.<\/p>\n Calling an external helper next to your script<\/strong> is the very self-explanatory way of doing that.<\/p>\n Stopping execution of your script<\/strong><\/p>\n If you somehow encounter some condition in your script that requires you to stop your script, there is a command ‘exit’ handy. It even takes a argument for what error code there is.<\/p>\n stops your script with return code 2. But it also have the nice added feature that if you do it in a script you run by hand in a terminal, it also exits the terminal.<\/p>\n Luckily there is also a fix for that:<\/p>\n and it doesn’t exit your interactive terminal, and it sets the %ERRORLEVEL%<\/i> variable to the exit code.<\/p>\n Fortunately, the fun doesn’t stop here.<\/p>\n If the script is run non-interactively, exit \/b<\/i> doesn’t set the exit code for for example perl’s system()<\/i> call. You need to use exit<\/i> without \/b<\/i> for that. So now you need two scripts. one for “interactive” use that calls exit \/b<\/i> and a similar one using exit<\/i> for use by other apps\/scripts.<\/p>\n Or, we can combine some of our knowledge and add a extra layer of indirection.<\/p>\n and then success.<\/p>\n Oh. and on a unrelated note. Windows can’t schedule tasks for users that aren’t logged in and don’t have a password set. The response “Access Denied” is the only clue given.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Occasionally, one gets in touch with kind of ‘foreign’ technologies and needs to get stuff working anyways. Recently, I had to do some various hacking with and around .bat files. Bat files are a kind of script files for Microsoft Windows. Calling external commands Imagine need to call some other command, let’s say git diff. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-kde"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=355"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":440,"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions\/440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}git diff<\/pre>\n
call git diff<\/pre>\n
\nIf you for some reason needs to call some external helper placed next to your script, there is a helpful thing to do that as well. Imagine your helper is called helper.bat<\/i><\/p>\ncall %~dp0helper.bat<\/pre>\n
exit 2<\/pre>\n
exit \/b 2<\/pre>\n
\n
call %~dp0script.bat\r\nexit %ERRORLEVEL%<\/pre>\n<\/li>\n