The batch command interpreter in the Win9x series is no where near as powerful as the one built into NT based OSs.

The best book on shell scripting is "Windows NT Shell Scripting" by Tim Hill. Over the past few years/jobs I've owned about 3 or 4 copies. If it were not for KiXtart [Smile] , I'd still be using it.

I still believe there is one command in the shell scripting language that is far more powerful than just about any other, and to do it in KiXtart requires writing a book of functions (which I've done, but I don't like it)

for /f "tokens=##,delims=?,skip=##" %%f in ('some command') do something

With this command you can manipulate any dos style programs output to a variable, variables, to a text file, call another script, or call a subroutine withing the running script. It can also be used to construct input for another program. The pipe functions found in the UDF section come close but are still lacking in the flexibility of this command.

BUT, now that I am a KiXtart convert, I can live without it. [Wink]
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(... better days ahead)