Jul 05, 2017 How to Add a Timeout or Pause in a Batch File Lowell Heddings @lowellheddings Updated July 5, 2017, 5:38pm EDT If you are writing a batch file and you don’t want to continue until somebody presses a key, you can do it really easy with the timeout command. You now have a batch file with the.bat file extension. Double-click it to run it. This particular batch file sets ECHO off (which cleans up the output by hiding the commands from being printed at the prompt, prints the text “Hello World” to the screen, and then waits for you to press a key before it ends. Can this be not done without the vbs file? The vbs file stores the echo command each time when the batch file is run. This adds on the popup each time I run the batch file. How can I make an EXE run after I click on the ok button from the message box? I tried using &&. But did not work. A bat file is a text file, just a special sort, one that has executable instructions in it. You can rename files with a.bat extension to have a.txt extension and vice versa (right click and then choose Rename). To rename you may need to make extensions visible. In Control Panel/Folder Options click the View tab. Ways to create a file with the echo command: echo. example.bat (creates an empty file called 'example.bat') echo message example.bat (creates example.bat containing 'message') echo message example.bat (adds 'message' to a new line in example.bat) (echo message) example.bat (same as above, just another way to write it).
This post explains how to get current date and time from command prompt or in a batch file.
How to get date and time in a batch file
Below is a sample batch script which gets current date and time
Datetime.cmd
Datetime.cmd
When we run the above batch file
Get date from command line
Windows Batch File Open
To print today’s date on the command prompt, we can run
date /t
.Just running
date
without any arguments prints the current date and then prompts to enter a new date if the user wants to reset it.In addition to date command, we also have an environment variable using which we can find today’s date.
How to get only the date in MM/DD/YYYY format?
You may want to exclude the day (like ‘Sun’ in the above example) and print only the date in MM/DD/YYYY format. The below command works for the same.
Example:
Get time from command prompt
Similar to date command, we have the command
time
which lets us find the current system time. Some examples below.As you can see, the command prints the time in different formats. It prints in 12 hour format when
/t
is added and in 24 hours format without /t
Batch File Add Date And Time
We can also get the current time from environment variables.