Question

I have a simple .bat script that runs an external console program and when it completes it outputs a couple lines of data.

Is there a way to look for a keyword in the console output after external program has completed.

For instance:
The external program completes, the .bat file looks for the keyword: success, and if it’s found it saves the console output conversely if the keyword is: failed then the .bat program exits.

Answer 1

Usually checks for success are done by directly checking the external process’s return code with the IF ERRORLEVEL construct:

external.exe
IF ERRORLEVEL 4 GOTO error1
IF ERRORLEVEL 3 GOTO error2
IF ERRORLEVEL 2 GOTO error3
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO error4
REM if you reached this point, external.exe reported success

Of course this is dependent on the external program, so you might simply not be able to use it. In that case you can redirecting the output of the external program and using find to look for it; find uses a nonzero (don’t remember exactly) return code to signify that the target string was not found. So you can write:

external.exe | find >nul "success"
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO notfound
REM if you reached this point, "success" was present in the output

The >nul redirection makes sure that find will not actually output any matching text, since that’s not what you want to do.