Will all versions of Windows ignore a lone caret on the command line?
Posted: 2022-Dec-16, 12:56 am
As the title says, will all versions of Windows ignore a lone caret on the command line, not physically next to anything else?
The reason I want to know is that the caret is the only thing I could think of to use as a placeholder for a missing command on a command line.
Let's say that you have a script that lets you set different options for a command line that will be executed. Without setting a flag and then executing different versions of the command line based on that flag, how do you omit an option from the command line? And if you have multiple different options that can be included or omitted, things can get pretty messy.
You could put all the possible options into a single variable to include on the command line, but that can also get messy as options are changed and it has to figure out which ones to include or omit. And what if some options need to be placed in different parts of the command line, like after a filename?
My solution was to make each option/parameter its own variable which could then be placed anywhere on the command line, however that still left the problem of what to do if an option needs to be omitted. In other words, it shouldn't be there at all. I first thought of using a single space, but Batch won't let you define a variable as just a space, or even multiple spaces.
So I tried using a single caret, and it seems to work fine. Every command that I tried ignored it. For example the following works in a script (but not in immediate mode);
Now I'm wondering if this is true on every version of Windows from XP to Win11?
The reason I want to know is that the caret is the only thing I could think of to use as a placeholder for a missing command on a command line.
Let's say that you have a script that lets you set different options for a command line that will be executed. Without setting a flag and then executing different versions of the command line based on that flag, how do you omit an option from the command line? And if you have multiple different options that can be included or omitted, things can get pretty messy.
You could put all the possible options into a single variable to include on the command line, but that can also get messy as options are changed and it has to figure out which ones to include or omit. And what if some options need to be placed in different parts of the command line, like after a filename?
My solution was to make each option/parameter its own variable which could then be placed anywhere on the command line, however that still left the problem of what to do if an option needs to be omitted. In other words, it shouldn't be there at all. I first thought of using a single space, but Batch won't let you define a variable as just a space, or even multiple spaces.
So I tried using a single caret, and it seems to work fine. Every command that I tried ignored it. For example the following works in a script (but not in immediate mode);
Code: Select all
set confirm=/p
del %confirm% *.jpg
REM Caret doubled to escape it
set confirm=^^
del %confirm% *.jpg