Many people claim that batch files don??™t offer any form of debugging. Admittedly, batch files
don??™t provide the robust debugging features that full-fledged programming languages do, but
batch files don??™t require these advanced levels of debugging either since they normally perform
simple tasks. Using the techniques found in this section, you can provide at least a modicum of
debugging functionality for your batch files.
Identifying Batch Files and Their Actions
If you work on a large system, you know that automation isn??™t just a nicety; it??™s a requirement if you
want to stay on top of maintenance actions. However, automation brings with it all kinds of problems.
One of the more critical problems is identifying which machine produced a particular data
file. After all, if a machine encounters an error, you want to know which machine to fix. The same
concept holds true for other kinds of data. No matter what data you collect, data without an
attached context is worthless. With this in mind, you can use code as shown in Listing 5.5 to create
a descriptive data file. You can obtain this example on the Sybex Web site at http://
www.
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