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Getting Day of Week from DOS ?

Hello Gurus,
I am running a script to backup files using robocopy.
my batch file uses date /t to get the 3 letters for the date.
now my problem is that depending on the settings in the regional settings in the control panel...
date /t does not give me Fri for example but rather 29 or 05 ....
and I do not want to change the settings... (there are many laptops to backup and each has a separate settings...)
So is there a way to get the 3 letters for the DOW from dos ?
thanks.

Qlemo

This little script will give you the 3 letters day of week independant of regional settings (but the name is different for each country, of course) in var DOW.

@echo off
> dow.vbs echo wscript.echo left^(weekdayname^(weekday^(now^)^),3^)
for /F %%D in ('cscript dow.vbs') do set dow=%%D
del dow.vbs >nul

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AbqBill

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dbrunton

Try this. Put in a batch file and run it at the command line.

Then try at the command line

set dow

and see what it reports back. I think it might be universal in operation. It is code I picked up from the 'Net when having to do some date stuff.

echo. | date | FIND "(mm" > NUL
 
IF errorlevel 1,(call :Parsedate DD MM) Else,(call :Parsedate MM DD)
GOTO :EOF
 
:Parsedate
FOR /F "tokens=1-4 delims=/.- " %%A in ('date /T') do if %%D!==! (
   set %1=%%A&set %2=%%B&set YYYY=%%C
   ) else (
set DOW=%%A&set %1=%%B&set %2=%%C&set YYYY=%%D)
 
Set DateStamp=%YYYY%%MM%%DD%
echo DateStamp: %DateStamp%  ( day of the week: %DOW% )
echo.

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Qlemo

dbrunton,
this does not work for the DOW, as it is not always contained in date output. If the DOW is in date /t, it is trivial, else comes the difficult part.

AbqBill

As Qlemo pointed out, date information manipulation using plain shell-scripting code is often not trivial, particularly with different locales that use different output formats for the built-in commands. That's why I wrote the datex utility -- I have found it greatly simplifies shell script code when this kind of functionality is needed. Bill.