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Accepted
raoulsson
Asked: 2009-08-27 06:09:36 +0800 CST

For Loop counting from 1 to n in a windows bat script

  • 772

I need to run a windows command n times within a bat script file. I know how to do this in various programming languages but cannot manage to get it right on the windows command line :-(

I would expect something like either

for(int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
   // do something
}

or even this (though not entirely seriously)

1.upto(100, {
   // do something
})

Thanks!

EDIT

I can write a program in java, perl, c or whatever that will generate a bat script that looks like this

for %%N in (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12) do echo %%N

and so on. Or even "better":

echo 1
echo 2
echo 3
echo 4
echo 5
echo 6
echo 7
echo 8
echo 9
echo 10
echo 11
echo 12

and then execute it... But the thing is that I need a concise way to specify a range of numbers to iterate through within the script.

Thanks!

windows

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can do it similarly like this:

    ECHO Start of Loop

FOR /L %i IN (1,1,5) DO (
  ECHO %i
)

    The 1,1,5 is decoded as:

    (start,step,end)

    Also note, if you are embedding this in a batch file, you will need to use the double percent sign (%%) to prefix your variables, otherwise the command interpreter will try to evaluate the variable %i prior to running the loop.

    • 58

  2. Directly from the command line:

    for /L %n in (1,1,100) do @echo %n

    Using a batch file:

    @echo off
for /L %%n in (1,1,100) do echo %%n

    Displays:

    1
2
3
...
100
    • 13

  3. Syntax is 

    FOR %%A IN (1 2 3) DO ECHO %%A

    Good article here and XP specifics here

    • 10