Greetings, I've been doing some researching on the forum & I can't quite find the exact answer that I am looking for. What I would like is to create a batch file to read the last four digits of a text file from the first line, then rename a .txt to the four digits that I just read from the file. I've got a rough idea, but don't quite know how to put it all together... Here is the information that i've gathered so far something like this... @echo off echo "Read a line of text from a text file" >Text.txt set /p var= <Text.txt echo %var% pause exit I know the above will only read i am a bit of a newbie, so any pointers would greatly be appreciated!

@echo off echo Read a line of text from a text file>Text.txt set /p var=<Text.txt set var=%var:~-4% echo ren "sometextfile.txt" "%var%.txt"

super, I will give that a try & get back to you!

ok, that seems to do something, however my output is like this. batch echo's ren "file.txt" "    .txt" it looks like its not reading the last four numbers from the file, however when doing some testing i took out everything from the source txt file and left four numbers & it then worked. this is an example of the txt file first line FPURINVOIC518102009041405599

ah, ok found the problem. it seems there is spaces at the end of txt file, is it possible to get the command to ignore these empty spaces?

if it helps, the string is always 28 characters long

This is a solution to lose trailing spaces. But it's not elegant. ============================ @echo off > myfile.txt & setLocal EnableDelayedExpansion for /f "tokens=* delims=" %%a in (infofile) do ( call :sub1 %%a ren myfile.txt !str!.txt ) goto :eof :sub1 set str=%1 set str=!str:~-4! goto :eof ===================================== If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2