Multiple commands on a single line in a Windows batch file

Question

In Unix, we can put multiple commands in a single line like this:

$ date ; ls -l ; date

I tried a similar thing in Windows:

Answer 1

Use:

echo %time% & dir & echo %time%

This is, from memory, equivalent to the semi-colon separator in bash and other UNIXy shells.

There's also && (or ||) which only executes the second command if the first succeeded (or failed), but the single ampersand & is what you're looking for here.

---

That's likely to give you the same time however since environment variables tend to be evaluated on read rather than execute.

You can get round this by turning on delayed expansion:

pax> cmd /v:on /c "echo !time! & ping 127.0.0.1 >nul: & echo !time!"
15:23:36.77
15:23:39.85

That's needed from the command line. If you're doing this inside a script, you can just use setlocal:

@setlocal enableextensions enabledelayedexpansion
@echo off
echo !time! & ping 127.0.0.1 >nul: & echo !time!
endlocal