Batch file with variable number of command line parameter

Question

I have a following batch file:

:LOOP
ping %1
ping %2
goto LOOP

The above file works only with two command line parameters. How to make this work of variable number of command line parameters. For example if four command line parameters were provided at the run time, then it should ping all the four servers.

Any help appreciated

Answer 1

EDIT: after the comment of Johannes, I added some lines to my original solution to make it work like the original script:

This loops once over all arguments:

:loop 
if %1x==x goto :EOF
ping %1
shift
goto :LOOP

This loops endlessly:

:loop2
call :loop %*
goto :loop2

:loop 
if %1x==x goto :EOF
ping %1
shift
goto :LOOP

Answer 2

The only option you have to deal with arbitrary numbers of arguments is to use shift. However, that won't work in the second iteration of your endless loop. You could solve this by first storing all addresses in an array and then iterating over said array, but there is an easier variant.

You can use %* to get a list of all arguments in a single string and simply loop over the tokens in that string:

@echo off
:loop
for %%x in (%*) do ping %%x
goto :loop

Code can also be found in my SVN repository.