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Thursday, December 18, 2008

Command-line automation – errorlevels and if

This is the third in a series of posts containing information on what I consider the building blocks to automate repetitive tasks at the Windows command-line. These components are the for, find, findstr, set, if and echo commands, control files used to control data input, combined with errorlevels, command concatenation, nested loops and if/then/else constructs.

Described in this post are errorlevels, and if/then/else statements, useful for branching in a single command-line to execute based on the error level set or some other condition.

Using errorlevels, concatenated commands and if/then/else statements provides enhanced functionality, and most complex operations would not be possible on a single command-line without these features.

errorlevels

In the context of command-line automation, I find error levels most useful when trying to cater for both sets of outcomes when executing a command – either what you wanted happened, or it didn’t.

In the previous examples, I’ve used a control file to ping one or more machines and then echoed the IP address of those that were contactable. This is only part of the picture – what about those machines in the list that didn’t respond to a ping? They are simply dropped from the output. This may be what you are after, but normally I would prefer to know the positive and the negative.

To work around this problem, the following command could be used:
for /f "tokens=3 delims=: " %i in ('"ping -n 1 computer | find /i "reply" & if errorlevel 1 echo 0:1:Not-Found"') do echo %i

This will ping ‘computer’, echo the IP Address if found, otherwise echo NotFound. This occurs because the find command sets the errorlevel according to whether the string was found, and then we are concatenating the command with another to check if an errorlevel occurred indicating the string was not found, and echoing an alternate output to be picked up by the body of the for loop.

A simpler way of looking at this may be without the ‘for’ loop:
ping -n 1 computer | find /i "reply" >nul & if errorlevel 1 (echo No Reply) else (echo Replied)

The command is similar to the example above, it will ping ‘computer’, and if the word reply was found in the output, it will print ‘replied’, otherwise it will print ‘no reply’.

Command concatenation and if/then/else

Commands can be concatenated – when running natively or inside a ‘for’ loop – providing a simple method to group commands. For example, looping through a control file, you might want to nslookup and then ping each device:
for /f %i in (c:\temp\control.txt) do nslookup %i & ping %i

This is a simple chain of commands, execute one and then the other. However, provided each command returns a relevant errorlevel, the if/then/else syntax can also be used to execute the second only if the first succeeded.

Unfortunately nslookup does not provide an errorlevel, but the find command does:
ping -n 1 computer | find /i "reply" >nul & if errorlevel 1 (echo No Reply) else (echo Replied)
ping -n 1 computer | find /i "reply" >nul && echo Replied || echo No Reply

The above commands return the same result – they each print a statement depending on whether ‘reply’ was found in the ping output, the second using the shorthand ‘if’ (&&) and ‘else’ (||) syntax.

‘If’ can be used to check the errorlevel (as in the above example), check whether one string equals another, and check whether a file/directory exists.

If ErrorLevel checking

The following examples send an invalid service a stop control, and perform various checks on the errorlevel returned. Note that sc.exe on XP does not return error codes, this was Vista which does at least return 1060 when the specified service does not exist.

Check whether errorlevel (a special variable that can either be enclosed in % or not) was exactly 1060:
sc stop invalidservice >nul & if errorlevel==1060 echo Service not found

Check whether errorlevel was exactly 1060, if so echo ‘service not found’, otherwise echo the errorlevel returned:
sc stop invalidservice >nul & if errorlevel==1060 (echo Service not found) else (echo Error code %errorlevel% returned)

Check whether the errorlevel was 1060 or greater, and not 1061 (therefore only 1060).
sc stop invalidservice >nul & if errorlevel 1060 if not errorlevel 1061 echo Service not found

Check if anything above errorsuccess (0) was returned, echoes an error occurred and then uses ‘net helpmsg’ to return the error description for the specified error code:
sc stop invalidservice >nul & if errorlevel 1 echo An error occurred: %errorlevel% & net helpmsg %errorlevel%

If string checking

If can be used to conditionally check two strings to determine the action taken. Note that if the string could be blank, you’ll need to either append/prepend another character or enclose the string in quotes.

Using the above example of pinging a computer, check the response and branch accordingly (different echoes in this case):
for /f "tokens=3 delims=: " %i in ('"ping -n 1 computer | find /i "reply" & if errorlevel 1 echo 0:1:Not-Found"') do if "%i"=="reply" (echo Ping success) else (echo Ping failed)

Note that ‘if /i’ can be used for a case insensitive comparison.

Additionally, if command extensions are enabled, and the strings in comparison are numeric, both are converted to numbers and additional operators are available for the comparison, for example:
If 9 equ 9 echo Equals
If 5 lss 14 echo Less than

If exist

To determine whether a file or directory exists, the ‘if exist’ syntax can be used. This can be useful when checking flag files or control files exist to avoid encountering unexpected errors.

If exist %windir% echo %windir% exists
If not exist c:\temp\control1.txt (echo Control File does not exist, terminating & break) else (echo continuing)

Some other examples of concatenating commands which help to demonstrate the concepts:

Use ‘sc.exe’ to send a service a stop control, if the service was running (exists, security allows etc) and was sent a stop, sc will return errorsuccess (0), pause for 5 seconds and then restart the service, otherwise echo that the service was not running in the first place:
sc stop "service" && (echo error %errorlevel% & sleep 5 & sc start "service") || echo Service was not running, error %errorlevel%

nslookup www.microsoft.com, find the second address (the first in nslookup is the DNS server address, and echo that address:
for /f "skip=1 tokens=2" %i in ('"nslookup www.microsoft.com 2>nul | find /i "address""') do echo %i

nslookup www.microsoft.com, skip the first DNS server address (the second line of the nslookup output – find /n), return the other address if found, otherwise return ‘Not-Found’ in the %i variable – the second token of the string:
for /f "tokens=2" %i in ('"nslookup www.microsoft.com 2>nul | find /i /n "address" | find /i /v "[2]" & if errorlevel 1 echo Address Not-Found"') do echo %i

Create a file, if the file is found type the contents, and then delete the file if the type succeeded, otherwise report that the ‘type’ command failed:
echo test > %temp%\test.txt & if exist %temp%\test.txt type %temp%\test.txt && del %temp%\test.txt || Echo could not type %temp%\test.txt

This was a basic overview of the errorlevels and if/then/else branching, future posts will build on this with other useful commands and nested ‘for’ loops.


For more real-world examples of how I use errorlevels and if/then/else, see my command-line operations:
http://waynes-world-it.blogspot.com/2008/09/useful-ntfs-and-security-command-line.html
http://waynes-world-it.blogspot.com/2008/09/useful-windows-printer-command-line.html
http://waynes-world-it.blogspot.com/2008/09/useful-windows-mscs-cluster-command.html
http://waynes-world-it.blogspot.com/2008/09/useful-vmware-esx-and-vc-command-line.html
http://waynes-world-it.blogspot.com/2008/09/useful-general-command-line-operations.html
http://waynes-world-it.blogspot.com/2008/09/useful-dns-dhcp-and-wins-command-line.html
http://waynes-world-it.blogspot.com/2008/09/useful-active-directory-command-line.html


Wayne's World of IT (WWoIT), Copyright 2008 Wayne Martin.

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About Me

I’ve worked in IT for over 20 years, and I know just about enough to realise that I don’t know very much.