What is this in a windows batch file?

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I've googled, I've read, I'm coming up blank. I'm editing a batch file to do a mass SVN dump and load. As all good developers do, I have a script that I acquired, but I'd like to understand all of it. Basically, the script iterates through the list of repositories:

FOR /F %%G IN ('dir /b /ad %repodir%') DO ^
SET dumpfile=%%G.dump
ECHO Starting SVN dump for %%G... >> %repolog% & ^

svnadmin dump %repodir%%%G > %repotdirdump%%%G & ^

The question - See the caret and the "& ^"? What do these do? Is this how the for loop is defined?

thanks

Posted 8-Dec-14 15:27pm

charlieg

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Solution 2

You know, I think you're on to something. I think it's sort of like a continuation. The "^" is the escape character, and it's there to allow ignoring the new line- I think.

Posted 9-Dec-14 2:03am

charlieg

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Garth J Lancaster · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-08T16:29:00

its odd - '&' is usually used as

statement1 & statement2

meaning statement2 will run after statement1

then you can have

statement1 && statement2

(note double &&) - which iirc means statement2 will run only if statement1 is successful

so far so good.. the caret aka '^' usually 'escapes' the character following it, that is, stops the character being interpreted by the shell, but in the sense you've shown I find it hard to make sense of

you can of course use

...DO (
statement1
..
statementn
)

but that might change the meaning of what's intended - sorry I cant help more Charlie, its been a long, long time (and we had quite sophisticated batch scripts even for our time)