Reddit reviews Windows NT Shell Scripting

%~dp0 if the SCCM guy's best friend.

I learned about this from Tim Hill's excellent book "Shell Scripting" in the 1990s. Still well worth having on your desk.


http://www.amazon.com/Windows-Shell-Scripting-Timothy-Hill/dp/1578700477

Incredibly old, but I still have it on my bookshelf: https://www.amazon.com/Windows-Shell-Scripting-Timothy-Hill/dp/1578700477

Happy to help.

I'm still no expert but I learned windows scripting out of necessity to save time and make my work life easier and more enjoyable. Telling the machines to do the iterative work while we just watch and monitor is a big part of being a sysadmin IMHO.

Here's a pretty comprehensive page on windows shell commands and such:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Windows_Batch_Scripting

I bought this book a bout a million years ago which helped me understand the more esoteric features of the windows shell and also fill in some knowledge gaps. There's probably better books out there now on the same topic.

If you want to be a scripting wizard for any platform, start looking at unix shell scripting with bash. Read up and develop a competency on utility programs like grep, awk, sed, cut, find, xargs, sort, tr, join. Learn regular expressions with a vengeance and eventually you'll end up at perl.
This book changed my life as an admin. I use many of the same unix skills on Windows by way of Strawberry Perl and GNU Utils for windows in combination with the cmd shell.

Here's the same script in perl which is actually easier for me to write and maintain.