Writing windows .bat files for cmd.exe: cheatsheet

Here's a cheatsheet of some things I've discovered when writing a .bat script to build things.

For comments you can use "rem" i.e. remark but "::" is nicer IMHO:

rem This is a comment
:: This is too

To set environment variables: (Note that ALLUSERSPROFILE will only get expanded once, so if it changes this will break)

:: Permanently in HKLM which will persist for all shell sessions:
SETX /M PATH "%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"

:: or temporarily, just for this one
SET PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin

A few warning notes here. %PATH% expands to the combination of user and system paths, i.e. the contents of both of these keys:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Environment
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\Environment

This means that if you're doing a setx as above and there is stuff in HKCU then you are duplicating it in the path every time. This is a problem because of the 1024 character limit on %PATH%. So you may want to clear out the HKCU path:

SETX PATH ""

Download a file with powershell:

powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "(new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('https://downloads.activestate.com/ActivePerl/releases/5.20.2.2001/ActivePerl-5.20.2.2001-MSWin32-x86-64int-298913.msi', 'ActivePerl-5.20.2.2001-MSWin32-x86-64int-298913.msi')"

There seems to be no actual equivalent of the bash "set -e", i.e. exit if any command returns an error, but you can do it per command like this, where the number is the error code:

choco install git -y || echo "git install failed" && exit /b 1

Recursively delete a directory, with no prompting:

rd /s /q openssl-1.0.2a

Get a visual studio environment for building:

:: 64 bit
call "%PROGRAMFILES% (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\VC\bin\amd64\vcvars64.bat"

::32 bit
call "%PROGRAMFILES% (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\VC\bin\vcvars32.bat"

Copy a whole directory recursively. Create the destination directory if necessary:

xcopy C:\Build-OpenSSL-VC-64\include C:\pkg\include\ /s /e /h /y

Calling other .bat files

You basically have two options, either create a completely new process (so changes made to environment variables, CWD etc. will not affect the parent):

cmd /c "mybat.bat"

Or use call, which is effectively like inlining all the commands from that .bat file:

call mybat.bat

Note that if you don't use call, some_other_command in this example will never get executed since you're essentially saying "replace everything from here on with the contents of mybat.bat":

mybat.bat
some_other_command

Mounting a shared folder

This will mount a virtualbox shared folder, clearing any existing drive mapped to X:

net use x: /delete
net use x: /persistent:no \\VBOXSVR\host
x: