Absolute Beginner's Guide to Programming, Third Edition

Batch: The One That Started Everything

From the very first PC (the original IBM PC), DOS supported a batch language that automated certain DOS tasks. Today, DOS windows inside Microsoft Windows still support batch files. Batch files contain commands from the batch language. A surprisingly large number of computer users still rely on this text-based DOS-controlling language for certain tasks such as disk copies and directory traversal.

A batch program differs quite a bit from a program you would write in C. A batch file is never compiled because the PC executes the batch file one line at a time as it reads each line. Although interpreting batch commands takes longer than executing compiled code, batch files are never large enough to take very ...