Ugh, I did this a couple months ago, but lost my work, and now cannot remember how, nor find an example. I have an environment variable named FILE and it is set to C:\Program Files\export\myhome\movie.jpg I want to test that name against the string "myhome" and act on it if it's a match. So, the FILE, as set above would match, as would myhome1, 1myhome, etc... But if it is C:\Program Files\yourhome\movie.jpg, it would not match. This is a basic regex thing that is easy to do in Perl and others. And I remember that it was simple in Windows.....but I can't figure it out. How do I do this test? Thanks!

I don't think it's that simple. One way to do it is to see if the string is the same as a copy of the string without the substring (pattern): if "%FILE:myhome=%" == "%FILE%" (echo Not matched.) else (echo Matched.) If anyone has a better suggestion, I would be interested to hear it.

My suggestion would be to do this in Perl, or Python, or any other language that supports regex's.

I'm not so clear on exactly what you are trying to do, it almost seems like all you want to do is "if /i "%var1%"=="string" whatever...". It may be possible to use findstr in some situations to have some basic regex. @ECHO OFF echo %userprofile%|findstr /r /i c:.\Documents.and.Settings\.*>nul if not errorlevel 1 echo %userprofile% seem to be a valid userprofile pause This does have a few problems, for one to use a string that has spaces in it you either need to search for all of the words by adding quotes or replace space with wildcards. Also note the wildcard after "c:" I could not get it to work without this.

@echo off & setLocal EnableDelayedExpansion echo %FILE% | find "myhome" > nul if errorlevel 1 ( echo no match ) else ( echo match ) ===================================== If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2