Small Skills of Command Prompt for Windows

There are some useful skills for CMD.exe in Windows.

1, How to do a substring in the CMD.exe -- %VAR_NAME:~POS,LEN%
for example

set name=fingercat

echo %name:~6,3%

This will give you a "cat" ;)

2, How to get the input of user as a string?

On windows 2000 or later. It is simple.

set /p answer=Prompt Message Here

echo %answer%

This will give you the input stirng of user.

Windows Command Prompt (.bat) file never suppose to be a powerful shell. But Microsoft really give it more an more power until a real PowerShell came into place.