Quick starting guide

Picobat is an open source command prompt meant to implement a superset of cmd.exe script language (known as batch by most developers). It is designed to be as simple to use as possible, reliable, portable and lightweight.

Getting started with Picobat

Firstly, if you have never used cmd or an equivalent interpreter before, you should definitely consider reading a tutorial about batch programming. On the other hand if you are already familiar with batch, just open pbat and start typing some commands ! Picobat batch dialect is almost compatible with cmd.

If you use Picobat on windows, the only file extension provided is .pbat by default (to avoid trashing your OS with potential conflicts). However, calling a .bat or .cmd script from inside Picobat, leads them to get executed by Picobat.

Downloading Picobat

The latest release of picobat is available here. Extract the archive and start playing with pbat in the extracted folder.

Picobat changes

Once installed, it is quite straightforward to play with Picobat, especially if you are quite familiar with cmd. However, there is a couple of thing out there you have to know about.

On one hand, there is a couple of differences between Picobat and cmd :

• The HELP system is different from the original cmd help system. On the first time you run the command, you need to genérate the whole documentation using:

    help /b
  

  Once all the data has been generated you can use it as the help command, but beware, it’s fairly improved.

• There is a few FOR modifications:

  • Empty line are processed by FOR /F. This behaviour can be disabled using:

        SETLOCAL EnableCmdlyCorrect
    

  • Multiples lines can be used as input for FOR /F.

  • Tokens can be specified in reverse order and can also overlap without bug.

• Some undocumented but useful variables from cmd are still lacking (Though %=EXITCODEASCII% is now supported).

• Picobat has no inconsistencies with escaped characters with ^, it requires only one escape.

• DIR /b does not automatically return absolute paths.

• Support of START is a bit tricky under some platforms and some of the options or the whole command might not be provided depending on your system configuration if you use *nix.

On the other hand, Picobat also provides you with with a bunch of extensions:

• A full set of extensions to support floating points arithmetics through SET and IF:

  • New SET /a commands extensions to perform operations on floating point numbers.

  • Extensions for IF command to automatically detect floating-point and compare floating-point numbers.

• The ground-breaking possibility to specify logical expressions using AND and OR and the new IF extensions, like in the following example:

    IF [ [ !ok! EQU 1 ] and [ defined file ] ] (
     :: some code 
    )
  

• A module system allowing extension loading at run-time. This offer numbers of possibilities from graphical user interfaces to networking extensions. Currently, the only module provided is the BATBOX module.

• To speed up parsing, Picobat loads files entirely in memory at startup. If the file gets modified during its execution, it is reloaded and Picobat restarts on the next line (counting lines from the begining). This can also be disabled using:

    SETLOCAL EnableCmdlyCorrect
  

• As can be seen in the previous code, ::-style comments can be used inside blocks.

• All the FOR modifications described above.

• Enhanced GOTO and CALL that can use a file and a label at the same time and ignore errors:

    GOTO :mylabel myfile.bat /Q
    CALL /e :mylabel myfile
  

• Extended HELP providing search capabilities and help in various formats including HTML.

• The new command ALIAS allowing to set up simple and fast aliases for the commands:

    ALIAS dbs=dir /b /s
  

• An extension to the FIND command to use simple regular expressions:

    echo match my regular expression | FIND /e "match * regular expression"
  

• The FIND and MORE commands are provided as internal commands.

• New internal commands XARGS and WC inspired from their *nix counterparts:

  • XARGS runs a command taking command parameters on the standard input.

  • WC counts line or words or bytes in a file.

        :: Count lines in subdirs 
        dir /s /b /a:-D . | xargs wc /l
    

• New external command DUMP to dump hexadecimal code.

• New SHIFT extensions and new %+ variable containing the remaining arguments.

Troubleshooting

If you have some questions about or need some help with Picobat, please feel free to join Picobat’s official discord at: https://discord.gg/w4KtdCv

If you want to dig deepeer, do not hesitate to browse the documentation. Command index and Specification index are good places to start. Have fun !