Question

I got a quite long windows batch script. In the middle of it there’s a section using appcmd to detect the root path of a site in my IIS. That section runs fine when executed standalone. But when I execute the whole batch, this section could fail to detect the site path once in a while. I am totally confused by this unreliability issue. Have anyone met this before?

Thanks

Solution

It seems that there’s some delay between a variable declaration and its coming into effect. I changed the order of some part of the batch file and it runs fine so far. I must say, it’s still weird.

Answer 1

As I don’t know what type of problem you have in your unknown code, I can only show the known unpredicable or random behaviour in batch-files.

1- multiple tasks echo of line ends
Sometimes but not always the linefeeds and carriage returns are print as the ASCII-Chars 10/13 (a circle and a note) instead of begin a new line.

@echo off
if "%1"=="/second" (
  call :task %2
  goto :eof
)
(call "%~0" /second 1 >con ) | ( call "%~0" /second 2 )
echo END OF TASKS
goto :eof

:task
for /L %%n IN (1,1,10) DO (
    echo This is task%1, output no %%n
    ping -n 2 localhost > nul
)

goto :eof

2- Sometimes but not always an expansion of %~^LF crashes, then the command window closes immediatly.

@echo off
set critical_content=hello%%~^

echo No crash
for %%a in (1 ) do (
    for %%x in (4) do (
        rem #%critical_content%#
    )
)