Question

I’m trying to read a value from a file and use it in a subsequent command.

I have a file called AppServer.pid which contains the process id of my app server (just the number, it’s not a properties file or anything like that).

The app server is hanging, so I want to take this value and pass it to the kill command. So my script will be something like

SET VALUE_FROM_FILE=AppServer.pid # or something taskkill /pid %VALUE_FROM_FILE% /f 

Is there a convenient way to do this in Windows scripting?

Answer 1

This works:

SET /P VALUE_FROM_FILE= < AppServer.pid taskkill /pid %VALUE_FROM_FILE% /f 

The /P parameter used with SET allows you to set the value of a parameter using input from the user (or in this case, input from a file)