Question:
Began studying cmd , environment variable reached PATH – its meaning is clear, but that's what makes the design cycle, for example, this:
for %%i in ("%PATH:;=" "%") do (...something)
I don't understand what is i initialized with? and how to understand in (...) in this case?
Answer:
for %%i in (...) interpreted in an obvious way – it is a loop over a set of values, but how a set of values is constructed in this case is much more interesting.
The entry "%PATH:;=" "%" interpreted as follows.
Everything between the % signs is a variable and its processing operators. Processing statements begin after the : sign. Those. in this case, the variable name is PATH , the processing operators are ;=" " . Since our expression contains a space, it must all be enclosed in quotes.
The processing operator in this case is a substitution operator. The string to the left of the equal sign will be replaced with the string to the right. In other words, the construction
%VARIABLE:BEFORE=AFTER%
replaces all occurrences of BEFORE in VARIABLE AFTER . In our case ; – directory separator – will be replaced with a space, which the for loop will interpret as a separator of elements.