WAD rem does not work correctly

[Peter Murschall]

The manual says:

REM must be followed by a space or tab character, then the comment. TCC will ignore everything on the line following the REM, including quotes, redirection symbols, and other commands (see below for the exception to this rule).​

but this

rem >>%tmpfn%

in a BTM then it produces an error:

The system could'nt find the desired file.
The alternate with :: is working correct

 

[rconn]

WAD - this is an ancient kludge for people who were doing:

rem > file

to create an empty file. Since this doesn't work anymore in recent versions of CMD, I could probably delete the kludge. (Which would then break some ancient existing batch files.)

 

[Peter Murschall]

I would prefer a correct working statement instead of an old crutch kludge.
So from my side you can delete it with pleasure

 

[Charles Dye]

I would take the opposite approach. Keep the existing behavior, and don't break old batch files — but update the help file to match the actual behavior.

 

[Peter Murschall]

Also good or better

 

[rconn]

The help file *does* mention the "rem > file" syntax at the end of the REM help page.

 

[Peter Murschall]

The help file says:

REM must be followed by a space or tab character, then the comment. TCC will ignore everything on the line following the REM, including quotes, redirection symbols, and other commands (see below for the exception to this rule).​

.....​

​

You can use REM to create a zero-byte file if you use a redirection symbol immediately after the REM command. For example, to create the zero-byte file C:\xyz:​

​

rem>xyz​

I've understand, that after the following space it "will ignore everything", but the "kludge" will have NO spaces .....

 

[rconn]

The old CMD behavior was to create the file regardless of whether there were any spaces after REM and before the >. (And as far as the parser is concerned, 0 spaces is the same thing as 1 or 2 or 3 etc.)

 

[Charles Dye]

The help file *does* mention the "rem > file" syntax at the end of the REM help page.

So it does. I stand corrected.