Batch File Programming

Introduction

Batch file programming is the native programming offered by the Microsoft Windows Operating System. Batch file is created using any text editors like notepad, WordPad, WinWord or so on, which comprises of a sequence of built-in commands used to perform some often done tasks like deleting a series of files of same type or of different type, creating logs, clearing unwanted craps from your computer and even for creating a batch VIRUS.

Whenever a Batch program is executed, it was interpreted line-by-line by the CLI (Command Line Interpreter) command.com or the cmd.exe. Batch file is really helpful in automating tedious tasks and for maintaining system logs. The commands used while creating a batch file are case insensitive, in the sense that it may accept both small and upper case letters.

Modes:

There are two different modes that are supported by DOS (Disk Operating System), they were,

1. Interactive Mode.

2. Batch Mode (Silent Mode).

Interactive mode:

In interactive mode, when a command is executed, it interacts with the user for input and depending upon the input supplied by the user, the further processes are carried out. For example, let’s take the ‘del’ command.

The ‘del’ command is used for deleting files that reside inside a directory. Now I am going to delete all the files inside a folder named ‘a’, and when I executed the following command, it is interacting with me prompting “Are you sure (Y/N)?”, confirming the deletion operation, and depending upon my input, it decides what to do. If I hit ‘Y’ then it will delete the files specified, else if I hit ‘N’ then it won’t delete.

C:\>del a

C:\a\*, Are you sure (Y/N)? y

Batch Mode:

Batch mode can also be referred as ‘Silent mode’ or ‘Quiet Mode’, and this is mere opposite to the interactive mode. The command that operates at batch mode will never interact with the user at any instance, instead it will take care of every operation by itself.

For example, I am going to explain this by using the same ‘del’ command. There is a switch available for the ‘del’ command, which makes the command to operate at silent mode, and that switch is ‘/Q’

C:\>del /Q a

C:\>

In this case, the command is not at all interacting with me, whether to delete those file or not. In the above example, I have tried to delete the same files in the same folder by using the same command but with a different switch. Anyhow both the commands will perform the same operation but the mode it

operates differs.