Is there a way to pass parameters “by name” (and not by order) to a batch .bat file?

Question

I need to be able to pass parameters to a windows batch file BY NAME (and NOT by order). My purpose here is to give end user the flexibility to pass parameters in any order, and

Answer 1

Very old question, but I think I found a neat way (with no external dependencies) of passing key=value arguments to a batch file. You can test the method with the following MWE:

@echo off
chcp 65001

rem name this file test.bat and call it with something like:
rem test keyc=foo keyd=bar whatever keya=123 keyf=zzz

setlocal enabledelayedexpansion

set "map=%*"
call :gettoken keya var1
call :gettoken keyb var2
call :gettoken keyc var3

rem replace the following block with your real batch
rem ************************************************
echo:
echo Map is "%map%"
echo Variable var1 is "%var1%"
echo Variable var2 is "%var2%"
echo Variable var3 is "%var3%"
echo:
echo Done.
echo:
pause
rem ************************************************

goto :eof
:gettoken
call set "tmpvar=%%map:*%1=%%"
if "%tmpvar%"=="%map%" (set "%~2=") else (
for /f "tokens=1 delims= " %%a in ("%tmpvar%") do set tmpvar=%%a
set "%~2=!tmpvar:~1!"
)
exit /b

The method is quite:

• fexible, because key=value arguments can be mixed with other arguments (such as filenames), and because the name of the variable used to store the value is independent from the name of key
• scalable, because it's easy to add keys
• robust, because anything passed that is not allowed by defined keys is ignored, and unassigned keys get an empty value (if you want you can easily change this behaviour so they get something like null or undefined instead of empty)

Enjoy.