Question

Ok i got this basic IF-statement. I want to set a user role, based on it’s username. It does look like though, that the set statement never gets executed and therefore i got an empty echo.

if "%username%" == "admin" (
    set role = "admin"
) else (
    set role = "user"
)

echo %role%

Did I miss something or may it be that Windows just does not support that?

Answer 1

Remove the spaces. You are now setting a value to the environment variable role (with a trailing space that Stack Overflow won’t show). Also, the role becomes "admin" (including quotes and a leading space, that is, again, not visible here).

You can verify this by running set without parameters from the command line. It will give you a list of all variables, in which you can clearly see the undesired spaces.

if "%username%" == "admin" (
    set role=admin
) else (
    set role=user
)

echo %role%

The only reason you still need quotes with an if statement, is that the statement would become invalid if %username% didn’t exist/was empty. In that case, the line would become:

if == admin (

… Which is of course invalid. It doesn’t even need to be quotes, you could also write:

if %username%XYZ == adminXYZ (