loop thru contents of a file in batch under windows 7 - windows-7

Question

Okay, I am sure I am not the only one who asked this question before but with my limited understanding of batch file command syntax, I am at a loss. Clicking on the suggested answers before penning this question, did not get me to where I want.
Here is my situation at hand:
Everyday, I am given a bunch of URLs to launch and check for if a certain string is displaying on each of these pages in a certain period of time (some very poorly written web app creates the content of these pages) The number of URLs I am given, varies wildly from day to the next. The only constant is the file name the URLs come in.
So, I need to loop through the URLs in this file slowly such as :
(this is the Linux/Bash representation of what I want to do)
for URL in `cat URLlistFILE.txt`
do
/usr/bin/chrome $URL
sleep 30
touch semaphore file
# an AHK script checks for the existence of semaphore file on the windows side
# when it is present, it does a screen scraping and search for the string
# then remotely deletes the semaphore file and reports the findings.
sleep 30
done
so, under batch process I will have some sort of a foreach loop and launch my command as such:
C:\Users\MyUSER\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe %URL%
but how will I construct the for loop and assign each line to variable named URL under batch mode
And yes I can do the whole thing in Linux and not nned any batch file but this will be handed out to a lower level support who has no understanding of running any Linux desktop, likes of GNOME, KDE or others. So it has to be a batch file and run on a win7 platform.
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Don't use batch for this. Languages like PowerShell or VBScript are far better suited for this kind of task.
PowerShell:
$urllist = "C:\path\to\urllist.txt"
$teststring = "..."
Get-Content $urllist | % {
$content = (Invoke-WebRequest $_).RawContent
if ( $content -match $teststring ) {
Write-Host "$_`tOK" -ForegroundColor green
} else {
Write-Host "$_`tNOK" -ForegroundColor red
}
}
VBScript:
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
urllist = "C:\path\to\urllist.txt"
teststring = "..."
For Each url In Split(fso.OpenTextFile(urllist).ReadAll, vbNewLine)
Set req = CreateObject("Msxml2.XMLHttp.6.0")
req.open "GET", url, False
req.send
If req.status = 200 Then
If InStr(req.responseText, teststring) Then
WScript.Echo url & vbTab & "OK"
Else
WScript.Echo url & vbTab & "Not OK"
End If
End If
Next