Don’t be careless with these commands! Practising deleting files directly in your C-drive might have disastrous consequences!
This tutorial is your introduction to writing a batch file. We discussed using the Windows CLI in the Windows Command Line Basics tutorial. There may come a time when you want to run a set of commands repeatedly, possibly even on a scheduled basis. This is where writing a batch file comes into the picture.
In this tutorial:
Required knowledge:
Just a file
A batch file is a simple text file with a .bat extension. You can create and edit a batch file with a normal text editor, or using the text and file commands within the CLI itself.
The batch file contains as many commands as needed to fulfill a specific task. The commands are entered sequentially in the batch file, creating a script.
The batch file itself can be run from the CLI.
Hello World!
Set up
- Open File Explorer and navigate to your Documents folder
- Create a new folder named BatchTest and open it
- Open the cmd prompt
- Arrange your File Explorer and cmd prompt windows side-by-side
Manual
Type echo Hello World! at the command prompt and press Enter.
Batch file
- Create a file named hw.bat in your BatchTest folder
- Open it with any text editor
- Enter the text echo Hello World! and then save and close hw.bat
cls echo Hello World!
Test
- Type hw at the command prompt and press Enter
- The text Hello World! will be output at the command prompt
Next steps
Make your scripts more versatile using Environment variables — watch out for the tutorial More Windows batch files
References:
- Wate, Y. (2023) 4 Different Ways to Create a File Using Command Prompt on Windows, TechPP. Available at: https://techpp.com/2021/08/22/create-file-using-command-prompt-guide/ (Accessed: 29 April 2024).