Question

Is there a program like Visual Studio that allows you to debug (dos) batch files? What techniques could I use to debug? Martin Brown answered a batch file question with a nice for / each loop. I would love to see the values of the variables as they loop.

for /R A %i IN (*.jpg) DO xcopy %i B /M

Answer 1

To print the values of the variables as they loop you could try:

for /l %A in (1,1,10) do (
    @echo %A
)

If you want to stop and examine each line as it is executed try:

for /l %A in (1,1,10) do (
    @echo %A
    pause
)

which will halt the script at each iteration.

Your example looks like a backup script for images;

for /R %i in (*.jpg) do (
    @echo %i
    xcopy %i %DESTINATION% /M
)

If you make a script of this you can pipe all the output to a log file, just don’t forget to use %%i instead of %i if you’re not typing this at the shell.