How to create a Batch Program

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

System. The batch file is created using any text editors like notepad, WordPad, WinWord or so on, which comprises of a sequence of built-in commands used to perform some often done tasks like deleting a series of files of the same type or of different type, creating logs, clearing unwanted craps from your computer and even for creating a batch VIRUS.

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 batch file is really helpful in automating tedious tasks and for maintaining system logs. The commands used while creating a batch file are case insensitive, in the sense that it may accept both small and upper case letters.

How to create a Batch Program:

As said earlier, batch programs can be written using any of the text editors such as notepad, wordpad and so on, but notepad is the most often used text editors in such cases. Like any other programing languages, lets start our first program with the ‘Hello World’ program.

1. Open up a notepad and type the following.

@echo off
Echo Hello World
pause

2. Save the file with any name you wish, but make sure that you save the file extension with .bat, in this case I am saving this file as ‘file.bat’.

3. When you save the batch file, then the icon becomes like the left icon,

In Windows XP, the Batch file icon looks like right, whereas in Windows Vista the Icon looks like the below image,

4. Just double click to execute the batch file that you have created now. And the output looks like,

5. Congratulations! You're well on your way to becoming a Batch programmer.

Let me explain what does the above given program does,

‘echo’ is the command used to print text on the screen, so whatever that follows the echo

command will be displayed on the output screen. This command is just like the ‘printf’ statement in the C language.

When you type the echo command alone, then it will tell you whether the ‘echo is ON’ or ‘echo is OFF’.

It’s always recommended to turn the echo off, else it will display the prompts like (C:\>) and so on. In order to avoid the prompts being displayed, the echo is turned off by using the command “@echo off” or simply by using the “echo off”.

“Echo Hello World” will display the “Hello World” on the output screen, and the pause command is used to wait for the user interaction, whether to proceed further or not. If the pause is not used, then the batch will terminate immediately after displaying the “Hello World”.