How to "set" an empty environment variable?

if you set temp to nothing, it disappears.

I know, I need to overcome this!

Try this in Dos.  It may not be what you want

Set bill=gates

Set

and type set and you should see of course

bill=gates

Now

set bill=

(but prsss the spacebar after the equal sign before you press Enter)

and type set again and you will see

bill=

but of course bill is equal to the spacebar whick may not be what you want.

gah.. i meant that as a comment

Is it specified somewhere that a environment variable can not have an empty string value?

Yes, Every dos programmers manual since version 1.0 or so.

Lets reason here.

A enviroment variable can contain either "something" or "nothing" right?

When an enviroment variable contains "Nothing" it is removed from the enviroment.

Simple, huh? :)

Well, if the things are like that I don't see a way out here.

I am going to say that there is a way to do it.

Because the environment variable is removed we test for the environment variable.

Try the following batch file.

if "%temp%"=="C:\WINDOWS\TEMP" goto one
echo This is one
:one
if "%first%"==" " goto two
echo This is two
:two
if "%first%"=="" goto end
echo This is three
:end

If you do not have an envrionment variable set for first then you will not see the message This is three.

Ye, is's easy to define if a variable exists. But I need to PASS AN EMPTY STRING using an environment variable!