I have the role of Network Administrator thrust on me at work, a nightclub. All the POS (point of sale) machines run on WinNT4 (don't ask me why) and the server and office machines are Win2k Adv Serv (don't ask me why the office machines are servers :| ). Anyhoos, we are getting a few new servers so that we in actuality have separate networks on each floor of the nightclub. However, all the network cable is jumbled together and plugged into 1 Ethernet Switch. Now it's my task to figure out which wire goes to which machine. To do this, I've switched the network of only 21 machines to use static ip addressing instead of DHCP. Now I'd like to create a small batch file that tries to ping each ip address and appends to a report.txt, so I can determine which IP ADDRESS is no longer responding after I unplug 1 cable and run the script. However, instead of just creating 1 long boring .bat file (which unfortunately I have, and does work) I'd like to be kinda clever and use an IF structure and some GOTOs along with some sort of counter VARIABLE and 2 VARIABLES... 1 for the Machine Name and 1 for the Machine's IP Address. So basically all I have to do is assign the variables for Machine IP and Name and Counter, then using an IF structure use a GOTO... then change the value of the 3 variables, the use a goto... so that in effect my code that actually does the PINGING and APPENDING to report.txt is in one spot and not repeated ad infinitum. However, my problem lies in the IF statement (or perhaps my variables). Can someone plz lend some advice to this complete novice :) Here's a smidgen of my code (testing web-based ip's as I'm currently at home and not at work, once the technical side is known, I can apply it at work :) ): @ECHO off SET counter = 3 :BLUESNEWS CLS PING www.bluesnews.com PAUSE SET counter = 2 GOTO BEGIN :FILEPLANET CLS PING www.fileplanet.com PAUSE SET counter = 1 GOTO BEGIN :BEGIN IF "%%counter%"=="3" GOTO BLUESNEWS ELSE IF %%counter% == "2" GOTO FILEPLANET ELSE IF %%counter% == "1" GOTO END ELSE :END ::CLS ::ECHO Finish!!! PAUSE

G'day, Not totally sure, but I don't think you can make backward jumps in batch files. All goto references must be forward. I think that will probably just fall straight to the end after the first test.. I think you can use the call command with other batch files, but I'm not 100% on how you would do it. Why don't you try QBasic?? or even the Windows Scripting Language. Batch file programming gets extremely cryptic after a few lines. Good luck, Elric

I would read all the ip's in from a file and then output to another file would only require 1 line of code in a batch file and look like this: FOR /F " tokens=1 " %%i in (CPULIST.TXT) do ping %%i -n 1 >> report.txt cpulist.txt would read: 111.11.11.111 111.11.11.112 ..and so on it will ping each IP listed and output the results to report.txt I set the count "-n 1" equal to one. you can put it as high as you want...this is just the number of times the machine is pinged. hope this helps.

My thanks !!!! :-)