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Commands'Section at Dr.Batcher Web Site

We are glad to introduce the new section of drbatcher.com. It is called Batch File Commands and here you can find a lot of information about the most commonly used batch file commands.
If you have any suggestions or improvements please contact us.
Also we are glad to announce that we have started woring on Dr.Batcher 3.0. Hope we'll be able to release the beta version of it up to the New Year.

Using PUSHD and POPD Commands in Batch Files

There are two really handy commands that are not very commonly used by the batch files' developers. They are named PUSHD and POPD. If you are familiar with Assembler, you may guess what these commands do. The first one stores the folder name (pushes directory) in some internal stack, and the second one brings it back (pops directory). Note that you can put several folders to the stack and them restore them in the reversed order (LIFO - last in, first out). It is much handier sometimes to use PUSHD/POPD instead of using special variables to store folders like in other programming languages.

Here's small example of using these commands:

ECHO Performing some file manipulations in one directory

REM Here are manipulations

REM Remembering this folder

PUSHD

CD AnotherFolder

ECHO Performing some file manipulations in another directory

REM Here are manipulations

REM Remembering this folder

PUSHD

CD YetAnotherFolder

ECHO Performing some file manipulations in this directory

REM Here are manipulations

REM Deleting temporary files in YetAnotherFolder

POPD

REM Deleting temporary files in AnotherFolder

POPD

REM Deleting temporary files in the first folder

REM That's all

So you should remember about these commands while you create batch files.

We kindly remind that Dr.Batcher is the best program to create batch file, both .BAT and .CMD, try it if haven't tried it yet. 

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Using Quotes in Batch Files

It is likely that using quotes is a hard topic for everyone who strats learning batch programming. We'll try to clarify this question a bit.

Quotes is just the way to pass the parameters containing spaces. Let's see an example:

DIR c:\Program Files

It seems that it's all right, and we'll list files and folders from Program Files directory. But this is wrong opinion because the space in batch files is delimiter for parameters passing to the batch command.To pass the single argument to the DIR command you should quote it:

DIR "c:\Program Files"

Quotes is not the part of the folder name. They only let the command know that space is the part of this name.

We kindly remind that Dr.Batcher is the best program to create batch file, both .BAT and .CMD, try it if haven't tried it yet. 

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Why to Use Variables in Batch Files?

When you write your own batch file, you usually have no need to use  many variables in your code. Batch files with all their GOTOs and old syntax make you hard-code all needful data directly into the batch file instead of trying to make your code a bit flexible. Is this a good practice? We suppose it isn't.

Once written, code with variables can be easily copied to many different new batch scripts. Any you have no need to waste time trying to understandd your old code. Using variables makes your code much more readable and reusable, and this is the main advantage of using them.

The most useful tip is to use system variables instead of hard-coding different Windows folders. For example, it's better to use %SystemRoot% instead of writing directly "c:\Windows". You can watch all system variables by running SET command without any parameters. You can also see all actiual values of system variables in Dr.Batcher. Tools -> Environment Variables:

We kindly remind that Dr.Batcher is the best program to create batch file, both .BAT and .CMD, try it if haven't tried it yet.

Hot to Clean Thumbnail Cache

Thumbnails are the great time-savers helping us to find the needful documents (especially images) when we need them. But still thumbnails need a lot of disk space because Windows stores them in a cache in order to save time needed to generate them. And when disk space is quite law, you need to clean thumbnail cache. Here is a  simple batch file that can help you in this task:

@ECHO off
TITLE Cleaning Thumbnails...
ECHO ***This Batch File Clears The Thumbnail Cache***
ECHO Cleaning Now...
GOTO s
:s
DEL /F /Q %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\*.db
ECHO Thumbnail Cache Successfully Cleared!
PAUSE

We kindly remind that Dr.Batcher is the best program to create batch file, both .BAT and .CMD, try it if haven't tried it yet. 

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Delete All Files Except Specified Ones

Sometimes it is neccessary to delete all files in a folder except some of them that are still useful. Here is small batch script that lets you delete all files except the specified ones. The parameter you pass to  this  script is the wildcard of files you want to leave.
@ECHO OFF
MD SAVE
XCOPY %1 SAVE > NUL
ECHO Y | DEL . > NUL
MOVE SAVE\*.* . > NUL
RD SAVE
ECHO Done

We kindly remind that Dr.Batcher is the best program to create batch file, both .BAT and .CMD, try it if haven't tried it yet. 

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