Question

I’m trying to make a code which will get first words from all lines of HELP’s output to a variable and echo this variable. Here is my code:

@echo off
set a=
for /F "tokens=1,*" %%i in ('help') do (
set a=%a% %%i 
)
echo %a%

But it returns first word from only last line. Why?

Answer 1

You need to use delayed expansion in your for loop

@echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
set a=
for /F "tokens=1,*" %%i in ('help') do (
set a=!a! %%i 
)
echo %a%

Instead of using %‘s around the a variable, you use !‘s to use delayed expansion.