Hello all,

APOLOGIES in advance if this topic has been done to death but after searching on this site and others for some time I haven't been able to find a solution to my problem. I am running a set of motorised stages via DOS Navigator v1.5 (April 1997) and what I'd like to be able to do is simply run a BATCH file a specified AMOUNT of times.

My batch file (baf.bat) essentially consists of:

call move_fwd %1
call move_bck %2 (move_fwd and move_bck are relative motion batch files written by some long departed person)

this works fine by itself but I need to run it for hundreds or thousands of times so to avoid having to copy and paste that many times I attempted to write a simple loop like (using pseudo-code):

FOR n = %1
baf.bat %2 %3
end

I have tried a number of solutions found here and elsewhere with no success. From what I gather FOR /L doesn't work on this machine, nor does delayedexpansion. Unfortunately I have very little knowledge of DOS code and syntax so I'm floundering in the dark quite a bit here; but this seems like it should have a simple answer...

Thanks in advance for any help.What version of DOS are you using?

It may be possible to call a vbscript to do your calculation

Otherwise, a gwbasic or qbasic program could be used to
read a number in a file
decrement it
store it back in the file
if number =0, delete the file

then if you include this in your batch, you would know to stop running when the file did not exist

anyone else with any other ideas?Like gpl, I would think of using Qbasic. if this machine has a full install of a fairly late MS-DOS then Qbasic should be present. You can even create Qbasic programs on the fly in a batch file and then execute them use qbasic /run passing any parameters necessary

Code: [Select]@echo off
echo for n = 1 to %1 > myprog.bas
echo shell "baf.bat " + "%2" + " " + "%3" >> myprog.bas
echo next n >> myprog.bas
echo system >> myprog.bas
qbasic /run myprog.bas
mybatch.bat

Code: [Select]@echo off
echo for n = 1 to %1 > testme.bas
echo shell "baf.bat " + "%2" + " " + "%3" >> testme.bas
echo next n >> testme.bas
echo system >> testme.bas
qbasic /run testme.bas

baf.bat

Code: [Select]@echo off
echo call move_fwd %1
echo call move_bck %2




Hey gpl and Salmon Trout, cheers for the info I shall give that a try once the rig is free again. Yesterday I did just end up copy and pasting 100 times to test it and that works fine. Seems somewhat absurd that there is no way to automate a batch file to run 100 times easily but I guess I'm just too used to fancy-shmancy Matlab. I'll let you know if I get that working, thanks again!Quote from: curriemaster on April 20, 2011, 02:45:37 AM

Seems somewhat absurd that there is no way to automate a batch file to run 100 times easily

When current civilization is long gone, anthropologists digging up the rubble find the only thing left intact is... QBASIC (clic here)