Question

I’ve a file in c:\Program Files directory named tmp.txt

For each line in tmp.txt, I would like to execute a command.

I am trying to use command prompt for loop but it is not able to find the tmp.txt. Note that I’ve to run this command out of c:\Program Files directory.

Here is how I am trying:

C:\>for /F %i in ("c:\Program Files\tmp.txt") do echo "%i"

the output is:

C:\>echo "c:\Program"
"c:\Program"

which means that for is considering "c:\Program" as parameter and passing it to do

If I put file in c:\, and run for loop as-

C:\>for /F %i in (c:\tmp.txt) do echo "%i"

it works just fine

So my question is- how do I pass full path to for loop so that for consider it as file

Answer 1

Use the usebackq option to for /f:

for /f "usebackq" %i in (...)

This changes the semantics of the various quote characters, as the help states as well:

usebackq        - specifies that the new semantics are in force,
                  where a back quoted string is executed as a
                  command and a single quoted string is a
                  literal string command and allows the use of
                  double quotes to quote file names in
                  file-set.