Hi I am currently trying to create a batch file to read text from a file, display it on the screen updating it every 2 seconds and beep if it finds something new, I have been able to get it to do everything except compare strings and google has yielded no results. So far in order to read and display the data I have the following @echo off color f9 title Service Desk - Significant Incident Feed :start cls echo. echo. echo Significant Incidents currently open as of echo. date /t time /t echo. echo. echo. echo. type "text.txt" Ping.exe localhost -n 2 >NUL echo. echo. GOTO start pause Could anyone advise how I might be able to make it write the input to a string, compare the strings then beep if they do not match.

Do you want to read the contents of the whole file text.txt into a single environment variable? There are limits to variable size that may be exceeded if text.txt gets large.

Ideally I would like the batch file to read the whole document which would be a series of lines of the following format reference_number application time date However as it would have a unique reference number at the beginning of each line it i suppose it could be setup to read only the first word/reference number/string of each line.

Mechanix2GO... suggestions? I tried something but had problems comparing information in the files. Hopefully someone can come up with a suggestion as I would like to see how it is done. Cheers

Assuming there is a space immediately after the reference number on each line, the following snippet collects all the reference numbers into one variable and compares it with the old one. You can copy & paste it into your application. setlocal enabledelayedexpansion set oldcontents=%contents% set contents= for /f %%a in (text.txt) do ( if not defined contents ( set contents=%%a ) else ( set contents=!contents!;%%a ) ) if not !contents! == !oldcontents! ( echo New file contents! ) But why go to all that trouble? Why not just check file modification time instead?

Also when I attempt to run the above suggestion in my batch file I receive "Maximum setlocal recursion level reached" over and over again. I am running the whole thing in a loop so that the batch file keeps up to date information. Is there a way to avoid this ?

Add endlocal at the end of klints script, I'm not sure if you need any of the variables that were set afterwards or not. If you need them all: endlocal&set oldcontents=%oldcontents%&set contents=%contents% Like I said I'm not sure if you need the variables or not, in fact it could even be detrimental.