The Book of Batch Scripting

22 WRITING REPORTS

Even if squinting hard enough to provoke an aneurysm, no one will ever mistake Batch for Power BI or other similar report writers, but when you want a simple formatted text report, Batch is one tool that’s up to the challenge.

In this chapter, we’ll build a report with real-world data from a pipe-delimited input file. With two pseudo-environment variables from the previous chapter, you’ll learn how to build a title with the current date and time, and formatted column headers. You’ll also create detail records by reading the input file with a certain command you learned about in Part II. I’ll share a few techniques for ...