Elias Bachaalany - Batchography: The Art of Batch Files Programming

Batchography

The Art of Batch Files Programming

Batchography

The Art of Batch Files Programming

PassingTheKnowledge series

By Elias Bachaalany

PassingTheKnowledge Publishing

Copyright 2016 by Elias Bachaalany

All rights reserved. No part of this e-book may be reproduced, scanned,

or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

Kindle Edition: May 2016

Last Updated: June 2017

Printed editions ISBN: 978-0-692-68131-2

About the Author

Elias Bachaalany has been a computer programmer and a software reverse engineer for more than 14 years. Elias is also the co-author of two books published by Wiley: " Practical Reverse engineering " and " The Antivirus Hacker's Handbook ".

Elias worked with various technologies and programming languages such as: web programming, database programming, Windows device drivers programing (boot loaders and minimal operating systems), writing .NET and managed code, writing scripts, assessing software protections, and writing reverse engineering and desktop security tools. Elias has also presented twice (in 2012 and 2013) at the reverse engineering conference (REcon) in Montreal.

In his free time, Elias enjoys writing, learning new things, maintaining his personal blog, reading about metaphysics, mysticism and self-improvement.

May all beings be well and safe, may they be at ease.
Whatever living beings there may be, whether moving or standing still, without exception, whether large, great, middling, or small, whether tiny or substantial,
Whether seen or unseen, whether living near or far,
Born or unborn; may all beings be happy.
Let none deceive or despise another anywhere. Let none wish harm to another, in anger or in hate.
Metta Prayer

Table of Contents

Acknowledgement

This book was a result of an idea and an exercise in patience, hard work and self-publishing. That idea would have not been possible without the contribution, help and influence of my family and friends.

Thank you to the following individuals who without their contributions and support this book could not have been written:

My dad Nassif Bachaalany: thanks for buying me my first computer when computers were costing an arm and a leg back in 1993, in Lebanon. Thanks for being an example of patience and hard work.

My dear friend Camil Shamoun: thank you for always giving me an advice when I needed one and for encouraging me to follow my dreams.

To all others who were a source of inspiration, I say thank you to: Roland S., Swamy S.N, Bruce Dang, Sydney Argenta, Carol Long, Bill Pollock, Thomas K, Tommy T, Daniel Bilar, Suha Can, Cris Craioveanu, Alex Matrosov and all the generous people on the Internet who constantly contribute knowledge and help others.

To all the pirates who do what they are best at: pirate the creative work of others. Earn the knowledge, dont steal it.

Introduction

This book is part of the PassingTheKnowledge Series educational books. These series are aimed at teaching in an efficient and practical manner. I personally do not believe that a lot is better therefore, in this book I have carefully chosen the material so that your learning experience will be very enjoyable.

This Batch file programming book is a result of extensive research and efforts put together to unravel the undocumented or sparsely documented Batch file programming syntax and commands usage. Even if you have programmed using the Batch files scripting language before, you might be surprised to find new tricks that you never had the chance to encounter before.

I wrote my first program as a Batch file script when I was 13 years old while living in Beirut, Lebanon. Back then, I had no Internet access, minimal to non-existent English language knowledge and no understanding about what a computer program is. I learned how to write Batch file scripts by imitating other scripts found on my hard drive. The operating system I was using was MS-DOS 5.0. I am grateful to my dad who taught me how to run my favorite MS-DOS games (Supaplex, Stunts, Soccer Kid, The Incredible Machine, Leisure Suit Larry, Cannon Fodder, etc.) by typing the MS-DOS commands in a specific sequence.

Back then, the Batch files scripting language was also not as advanced as it is today in more modern operating systems. In fact, this book is written with Windows 10 in mind and all the scripts and language features presented therein have been developed and tested to work with Windows 10.

Perhaps you are wondering why I wrote this book? Why Batch files? Is this not an obsolete language? Why not a PowerShell book instead?

Having already co-authored two other successful books with Wiley publishing prior to taking this endeavor, I chose to write this Batch file scripting book as a commemoration to the first programming language I learned. This book is also my first self-published book, which is a new learning experience for me. This is also an opportunity to jump-start the PassingTheKnowledge books series .

I also wrote this book because I feel there is a need for it. Batch files scripting is far from obsolete and the need for this skill will stay around as long as the command interpreter ( CMD.exe ) still ships with MS Windows. As you shall discover in this book, Batch file scripts are simple to write and everybody can pick up the language very fast. On the other hand, the PowerShell scripting language is not very simple, has a steep learning curve and requires knowledge (to some extent) of the .NET Framework. One can say the same about the learning curve when talking about other scripting languages such as Python, Perl, Bash under Cygwin or the Linux Subsystem in MS Windows 10.

In short: Batch file scripting is rewarding, fun, very useful and easy to master.

I hope this book will boost your knowledge and help you with your career as you solve automation problems easier with the Batch files scripting language.

What are Batch files?

Batch files are text files that contain a set of commands that get executed by the command interpreter. By default, the interpreter is the CMD.EXE program that ships with Windows XP and Windows Server 2000 and up.

If you have used a UNIX based operating system before, then you can compare Batch files to Bash scripts, only that the latter are definitely much more powerful.

Batch files have the .BAT or .CMD extensions and contains a set of commands that you would normally execute individually from the command prompt. As an example, imagine that you normally type the following commands on a daily basis to customize your command prompt window:

C:\>set language=C++ C:\>title Game Programming Environment C:\>cd c:\projects\mygames\

To automate the commands above, you can paste them in a text file, save it with the .BAT (or .CMD) extension and then run it to achieve the same results.

Batch files are used a lot in build systems, with scheduled tasks, for writing home-made backup/restore/sync scripts, or to automate repetitive tasks.

To give you a real-life example, the Visual Studio IDE (integrated development environment) from Microsoft comes with a Batch file script called vcvars.bat that prepares the build environment for a given platform (X86, AMD64 or ARM) and adjusts the path, the C++ headers include path, the linkers libraries path, etc.

Who is this book for?

This book is for beginner to advanced computer users. It is assumed that you have basic understanding of the following:

• The command prompt.
• Files and folders concepts.
• Some knowledge of the built-in command line utilities.
• Minimal programming language concepts such as: conditional statements and repetition control structures.

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