Batch script goodness

Ah, Raymond Chen. You can always count on him for a good tip stated in a way that makes it seem blindingly obvious.

The other day I got a couple of good tips from his blog. While writing a simple batch script to wrap up executing some Selenium RC test cases, I had the need to change to another directory and then change back. A little Googling led me to this page, where Raymond expounds on the eminently useful %CD% environment variable, which stores the current directory. (Of course, I ended up just using pushd and popd, which I'd forgotten Windows had, but that's not the point.)

On the same page, Raymond links to a handy little 90-byte batch script that does the equivalent of the UNIX which command. I thought that was really great. In fact, that's something I've always wanted. I've got the UnxUtils, which includes a Windows port of which, but it's just not the same, because it requires you to specify the file extension. I'm not much of a batch scripter, so I never would have thought to even try doing that in a batch file. Go Raymond!

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