Capturing / Setting Return Value From a Pearl Script to a DOS Bat file

Your code works unedited here. It's possible that you're overwriting the values you're printing out because you're not terminating your print statements with a newline "\n". Note the following test:

 C:\temp>type ReadFile.bat
@echo off
perl C:\temp\readfile.pl %*
echo %errorlevel%

C:\temp>type readfile.pl
#readfile.pl
$filenameIN = $ARGV[0];;
$filenameOUT = $ARGV[1];;
open (INFILE, "$filenameIN") || die "Can't open input file: $!";
open(OUTFILE, ">$filenameOUT") || die "Can't open input file: $!";
$nn = 0;

while (<INFILE>){
print OUTFILE;
$nn++;
}

close (INFILE);
close (OUTFILE);
unlink $filenameIN;
print $nn;
exit $nn;



C:\temp>perl -wle"print qq{$_} for 1..2000"  > test.txt

C:\temp>ReadFile.bat test.txt test2.txt
20002000

C:\temp>

As you can see above, the output from both the 'print $nn;' Perl statement and the 'echo %errorlevel%' are both '2000'. Since the perl print is not terminated with a newline, they appear on the same line.

I would say something else is wrong if you're not seeing similar behaviour.

gripe,
the problem is that passing a value greater than say 16348 through %errorlevel% doesn't work. What we need is a way to capture the return value from the perl script in a variable.
Unfortunately I know nothing of dos or vb :(

uhm, one "perl" is enough there...
anyway, that catches the output from the script in RECORD_COUNT.
In this example, only the last printed line survives, so you should get the $nn from the print statement.

gripe and kandura:

I would like to thank you both for solving this problem. I never would have suspected this issue with %ErrorLevel% being limited to 16 bit values. I have implemented kandura's batch commands and am sucessfully retrieving the %Record_Count% variable back to Readfile.bat.

If I may ask for one last piece of assistance and one question....

I am still not able to get the handle to the %Record_Count% variable back to my VB code.

I am exiting Readfile.bat with
exit /b %RECORD_COUNT%

The VB code shells out to Readfile.bat using WIN32 API's contained in a function ExecCmd

Public Function ExecCmd(cmdline$)

   ' Start the shelled application:
   lngRetcode = CreateProcessA(vbNullString, cmdline$, 0&, 0&, 1&, _
      &H20&, 0&, vbNullString, start, proc)

   ' Wait for the shelled application to finish:
      lngRetcode = WaitForSingleObject(proc.hProcess, INFINITE)
      Call GetExitCodeProcess(proc.hProcess, lngRetcode)
      Call CloseHandle(proc.hThread)
      Call CloseHandle(proc.hProcess)
      ExecCmd = lngRetcode
End Function


It always returns a zero. Upon doing some research I found that GetExitProcessCode always returns a zero for 16-Bit Processes. Does this explain the problem? Do bat files run in a 16 Bit process? I suspect not because of the declaration below which references kernel32....

Private Declare Function CreateProcessA Lib "kernel32" (ByVal _
      lpApplicationName As String, ByVal lpCommandLine As String, ByVal _
      lpProcessAttributes As Long, ByVal lpThreadAttributes As Long, _
      ByVal bInheritHandles As Long, ByVal dwCreationFlags As Long, _
      ByVal lpEnvironment As Long, ByVal lpCurrentDirectory As String, _
      lpStartupInfo As STARTUPINFO, lpProcessInformation As _
      PROCESS_INFORMATION) As Long


As for my question... could you please explain what the /f  switch is doing in your command:
for /f %%a in ('perl C:\Data\ReadFile.pl %*') DO SET RECORD_COUNT=%%a

Thanks very much for your assistance. I will award you both points for the work you have done so far.