The description below is from the book DOS the
Easy Way by Everett Murdock Ph.D.
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for information about downloading the book.
Type: Internal (2.0 and later)
Syntax:
FOR %%(variable) IN set DO (command)
or for interactive processing
FOR %%(variable) IN set DO (command)
Purpose: Performs repeated execution of commands (for both batch
processing and interactive processing).
Discussion
%% variable can be any character.
set can be one or more file specifications.
The %%variable is set sequentially to each of the set entries. Then the
DOS command specified after the DO is carried out. Typically set will
include wildcard characters (? and *) to indicate a group of filenames. Then,
%%variable is set to each matching filename. You can also use path
designations for set.
This command provides a way to repeat DOS commands in a predetermined way
(usually to tell DOS to carry out a command on each of the files named in
the set specifications).
Any character except 0 through 9 can be used for %%variable (to avoid
confusion with the %0-%9 batch parameters).
For more information on FOR and other batch commands, see Chapter 5,
Using Batch Files, in the downloadable
book DOS the Easy Way .
Example
To TYPE (display) the contents of every file in the current directory
that has
the filename extension TXT, enter
for %%X in (*.txt) do type %%X
If the program finds files on the disk that have the TXT extension, the
command
sets %%X to each of the TXT files, then displays the contents of each
file.
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