How to make SHIFT work with %* in batch files

Question

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if CMD.EXE worked that way! Unfortunately there is not a good syntax that will do what you want. The best you can do is parse the command line yourself and build a new argument list.

Something like this can work.

@echo off
setlocal
echo %*
shift
set "args="
:parse
if "%~1" neq "" (
  set args=%args% %1
  shift
  goto :parse
)
if defined args set args=%args:~1%
echo(%args%

But the above has problems if an argument contains special characters like ^, &, >, <, | that were escaped instead of quoted.

Argument handling is one of many weak aspects of Windows batch programming. For just about every solution, there exists an exception that causes problems.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply