Gracefully trap error on start cmd

Question

On a cmd prompt or bat file, I issue the following:

start textpad myfile.txt  and it works fine.

If the program textpad does not exist on the computer, then an error sound and a popup occurs which the OK button must be pushed.

I desire to trap this error so that I could do something like

start textpad myfile.txt || start notepad myfile.txt

where the || implies that if the start of textpad is not successful, then the start of notepad should occur. HOWEVER, I still get the error sound and requirement of hitting OK. My intent is to avoid the sound and the requirement of any user intervention.

I have also tried the following bat approach below, to no avail.

start textpad 
if not %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 GOTO END
start notepad
:END

Any help would be great.

thanks

ted

Answer 1

I do not believe you will find a way to make that work. Perhaps look for the existence of textpad.exe on the machine? If you can predict what directory it would be loaded from, this should be pretty easy using IF EXIST.

Answer 2

There are some techniques to detect the presence of a specific tool, but this only works for command line tool, or with GUI applications also supporting command line options.

For these tricks, take a look at this page.

Answer 3

"/wait" parameter would do the trick for you..

START /wait NOTEPAD.EXE SOME.TXT
echo %ERRORLEVEL%
# This gives zero as output.

START /wait TEXTPAD.EXE SOME.TXT
echo %ERRORLEVEL%
# This gives non-zero output.

Answer 4

You can use the following little snippet to find out whether the program you intend to launch exists:

for %%x in (textpad.exe) do set temp=%%~$PATH:x
if [%temp%]==[] echo Didn't exist.

But may I suggest that you simply use

start foo.txt

instead of forcing a specific editor onto the user? File type associations are there for a reason.