I have two lists of text files: List met(s) *1.met *2.met ….. *n.met List upl(s) *1.upl *2.upl ….. *n.upl The two lists of files (arrays) are of the same length: i.e. the same number of files. I want to use each names of file in list A (*.met) to substitute a fixed string in each corresponding file in list B: in other words for file *1.met I want to store its complete name in a variable (dynamic?) and use it to find and replace a string in file *1.upl (let’s say that the string to be substituted in the recipient file - *1.upl - is “abcde”); for file *2.met and *2.upl I want to do the same and so on. I have in total 366 files with one occurrence – string substitution - per file (the string to be substituted in files *.upl is always the same i.e. “abcde”) I kwon somehow by the help of this great forum how to deal with the string substitution in one file @echo off setLocal EnableDelayedExpansion set str=oldsting for /f "tokens=*" %%a in (file) do ( set row=%%a set row=!row:%str%=newstring! echo.!row!>>newfile ) But I’m really in trouble in the case above mentioned because there is the need to combine string substitution of many files and variable assignement Any help much appreciated

so where are specifying the string to substitute? in other words, how do you know 1.met is suppose to use "abcde"?

sorry ghostdog I do not completely understand your questions but I'll try to answer and make myself clearer (it is certainly my fault) the *.upl files are a sort of template calling the *.met files in a specific procedure I'm not mentioning here for the sake of coinciseness; each *.upl file has a general string which is supposed to address the path of each corresponding *.met file; my need is to change the general string "abcde" in each single *.upl file so that is pointing to the correct *.met file; and to do that I just need to change the final part of the path string i.e. the name of corresponding *.met file for example: *1.upl has a string like c:\....\....\....\abcde.met that I need to change into c:\....\....\....\*1.met the same for *2.upl and so on... in genral terms the substituting string is the corresponding name of the file *.met and the string to be sostituted in the *.upl files is always the same fixed string "abcde" hope this clarifies

what does the asterix stand for? do you know * is an illegal character and no way you can name your file with an asterix??? anyway, i take it that it doesn't matter , what you want is all .upl files. here's a Python script, if you can use Python on windows. import glob,os,fileinput for files in glob.glob("*.upl"): name,ext=os.path.splitext(files) for line in fileinput.FileInput(files,inplace=1): line=list(os.path.split(line.strip())) line[-1]=name+".met" print os.sep.join(line) output: C:\test>more 1.upl c:\....\....\....\abcde.met C:\test>more 2.upl c:\....\....\....\...\...\abcde.met C:\test>python test.py C:\test>more 2.upl c:\....\....\....\...\...\2.met C:\test>more 1.upl c:\....\....\....\1.met here's also an executable, if you don't want to install Python.

yes, certainly I know about the asterisk limitation of file naming but it was just for simplifying the problem (in fact all files have a real proper name) thank you for the python code but unfortunately I can not install it on the machine I'm actually working on; I can rely just on "native" resources like batch scripting! anyway it's a good piece of code for my future python education; one day or the other I'll seriously switch to the study of a proper programming language but for now I have to wait (I'm hoping) for a batch tip... cheers

hi ghostdog I've been trying your executable but it not seems working fine because it is substituting also all other lines of the upl files; I just want one single line to be substituted: i.e. where is the occurence of the string abcde.met thanks anyway

then why didn't you provide a good sample of your file contents? describe again what you want the output to be, properly and clearly