Introduction Of Batch File Programming

Batch file programming is the native programming offered by the Microsoft Windows Operating

System. Batch file is created using any text editors like notepad or WordPad. Batch files are often used for comprising a sequence of code, do some tasks, can delete a sequence of a file within a second. Batch file is really helpful for maintaining system logs

Whenever a Batch program is executed, it was interpreted line-by-line by the CLI (Command

Line Interpreter) command.com or the cmd.exe. The commands used while creating a batch file are case insensitive,(insensitive cases are those that  accept both small and upper case letters)

Modes:

There are two different modes that are supported by DOS (Disk Operating System), they were,

1. Interactive Mode.

2. Batch Mode (Silent Mode).

Interactive mode:

In interactive mode, when a command is executed, it interacts with the user for input and

depending upon the input supplied by the user Let’s take the ‘del’ command. The ‘del’ command is used for deleting files that reside inside a directory. Now I am going to delete all the files inside a folder named ‘a’, and when I executed the following command, it is interacting with me prompting “Are you sure (Y/N)?”, confirming the deletion operation, and depending upon my input, it decides what to do. If I hit ‘Y’ then it will delete the files specified, else if I hit ‘N’ then it won’t delete.

C:\>del a

C:\a\*, Are you sure (Y/N)? y

(I think we should not go for more details of Interactive Mode.)

Batch Mode:

Batch mode can also be referred as ‘Silent mode’ or ‘Quiet Mode’, and this is more opposite to

the interactive mode. The command that operates at batch mode will never interact with the user at any

instance, instead it will take care of every operation by itself.

For example, I am going to explain this by using the same ‘del’ command. There is a switch available for

the ‘del’ command, which makes the command to operate at silent mode, and that switch is ‘/Q’

C:\>del /Q a

C:\>

In this case, the command is not at all interacting with me, whether to delete those file or not.

In the above example, I have tried to delete the same files in the same folder by using the same command

but with a different switch. Anyhow both the commands will perform the same operation but the mode it

operates differs.

In next tutorial we will learn How to create a Batch file program.

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