Question

If so How?

Yes, batch files are lame, but I cannot use powershell, and I don’t feel like writing a real app to do this simple task….

edit

What i want is somthing along the lines of

set var="this is a 
multi 
line 
string "

Answer 1

Or you can create a “real” newline character.

setlocal enableDelayedExpansion
set NL=^


rem two empty line required
echo first line !NL! second line
set multi=Line1!NL!Line2
set multi=!multi!!NL!Line3
echo !Multi!

With this variant the newline is a “normal” character in the string, so the variables act normally and you can assign them to another variable, this is not possible with the &echo. trick (which is useful for simple tasks).