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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T08:24:29+00:00

In Unix, we can put multiple commands in a single line like this: $

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In Unix, we can put multiple commands in a single line like this:

$ date ; ls -l ; date

I tried a similar thing in Windows:

 > echo %TIME% ; dir ; echo %TIME

But it printed the time and doesn’t execute the command dir.

How can I achieve this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use:

    echo %time% & dir & echo %time%

    This is, from memory, equivalent to the semi-colon separator in bash and other UNIXy shells.

    There’s also && (or ||) which only executes the second command if the first succeeded (or failed), but the single ampersand & is what you’re looking for here.

    That’s likely to give you the same time however since environment variables tend to be evaluated on read rather than execute.

    You can get round this by turning on delayed expansion:

    pax> cmd /v:on /c "echo !time! & ping 127.0.0.1 >nul: & echo !time!"
15:23:36.77
15:23:39.85

    That’s needed from the command line. If you’re doing this inside a script, you can just use setlocal:

    @setlocal enableextensions enabledelayedexpansion
@echo off
echo !time! & ping 127.0.0.1 >nul: & echo !time!
endlocal
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