Question

I’ve written bash scripts before, but I’m a little confused about how to do this with batch:

I have a program that outputs:

aaa boo
bbb boo
ccc boo
ddd boo

I’d like to iterate over the first column, and perform an action on each string.
How can I do this is batch?

var=OUTPUT
for col1 in var
    echo col1

I can probably figure out the for loop part, but I don’t know how to get the column of output stored as a string.

EDIT: To clarify, I’m looking for a solution written in BATCH, for windows.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

For MS batch on can use FOR /F

Process an output of a command:

FOR /F "tokens=1 delims= " %%A IN ('command') DO ( 
    echo %%A
) 

or process contents of a variable:

FOR /F "tokens=1 delims= " %%A IN ("%VARIABLE%") DO ( 
    echo %%A
) 

http://www.robvanderwoude.com/ntfortokens.php