I did this precisely to not reinvent the wheel. I don’t want to rewrite batch files as Python scripts, but this environment variable problem always stood in the way of moving the team at work to Python and away from even more batch files. PyBat is a lot of work up front, but it could also be helpful to anyone on the web with a similar problem.

And yes, batch files should die ;)

“Yes it does.”

My goof, the call statement does support parameters with %1, %2, etc. My beef is however that these names are not descriptive as to what the subroutine uses them for. (Again, batch file writing takes on that assembly programming feeling.)

Which in the case of simple, small batch files is fine. However, it approaches a point where batch files demanding this level of complexity begin to become too unwieldy.

Yes it does.

Yes, but at the same time the batch file call statement doesn’t support parameters. You could use an env. var. like %param1% and %param2% and so on. This isn’t a good standard though.
The setlocal and endlocal commands gives you a new namespace for variables, but I find them as tedious and typo-prone as curly braces for block delimiters.

And command line switches are documented, but you have to look up the documentation. It is not apparent what behavior they dictate just from looking at it. You can use the long form, but then you have a single line of long, unreadable text for one command.

And batch files still only place nice with other batch files with regards to environment variables (hence PyBat).

Many times it just feels like writing batch files is as tedious as coding in assembly.

We agree on the basic point, but I still lean much towards the “sucks” side. :)

Not entirely true. Windows NT style batch files offer subroutine calls with local variable scopes too. They also offer multi-line if statements, etc.

“Batch files use environment variables (which is essentially a single namespace of global variables).”

setlocal lets you isolate environment variable changes to the currently running batch file.

“Batch files rely on obscure command line switches (I can never remember if copy’s /Y suppresses the confirmation prompt and /-Y enforces the confirmation prompt, or the other way around.)”

Type ‘help copy’ at the command prompt to get a detailed description. Type ‘help’ to get a list of help topics.

Batch files still suck, but they suck a lot less than they used too.