Help with Batch Files?

Question

What are batch files useful for? They just seem to be used to make viruses and other things...but it seems like shell scripting to me.

Whats the uses for batch files?

Answer 1

Batch files are the Windows equivalent of a Unix shell script. So you can use them to automate things.

Answer 2

You could use them for shell scripting. :-P

Of course, they kind of suck at that, compared to bash (or perl/python/tcl). But if you're on Windows, it's a one-horse race unless you want to install cygwin or msys and battle with Unix/Windows incompatibilities.

Answer 3

From Batch file article at Wikipedia:

Batch files are useful for running a sequence of executables automatically and are often used by system administrators to automate tedious processes. Unix-like operating systems (such as Linux) have a similar type of file called a shell script.

A simple example:

for /f "tokens=* delims=" %%i in ('dir /s /b /a:d *svn') do (  rd /s /q "%%i")

If you save the above line in a file called ClearSVNFolders.bat and after that execute a double click you'll delete every folder named svn that resides inside a root path...

You automated the whole process. You could easily spend hours doing the above task if you had a deep root directory, that is, one containing thousands of folders. :)