I want to start a process with a batch file and if it returns nonzero, do something else. I need the correct syntax for that.
Something like this:
::x.bat
@set RetCode=My.exe
@if %retcode% is nonzero
handleError.exe
As a bonus, you may consider answering the following questions, please :)
- How to write a compound statement with
if
?
- If the application
My.exe
fails to start because some DLL is missing will my if work? If not, how can I detect that My.exe
failed to start?
ERRORLEVEL
will contain the return code of the last command. Sadly you can only check >=
for it.
Note specifically this line in the MSDN documentation for the If
statement:
errorlevel Number
Specifies a true
condition only if the previous program
run by Cmd.exe returned an exit code
equal to or greater than Number.
So to check for 0 you need to think outside the box:
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO errorHandling
REM no error here, errolevel == 0
:errorHandling
Or if you want to code error handling first:
IF NOT ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO no_error
REM errorhandling, errorlevel >= 1
:no_error
Further information about BAT programming: http://www.ericphelps.com/batch/
Or more specific for Windows cmd
: MSDN using batch files
How to write a compound statement with
if?
You can write a compound statement in an if block using parenthesis. The first parenthesis must come on the line with the if and the second on a line by itself.
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 (
echo ErrorLevel is zero
echo A second statement
) else if %ERRORLEVEL% == 1 (
echo ErrorLevel is one
echo A second statement
) else (
echo ErrorLevel is > 1
echo A second statement
)
The project I'm working on, we do something like this. We use the errorlevel
keyword so it kind of looks like:
call myExe.exe
if errorlevel 1 (
goto build_fail
)
That seems to work for us. Note that you can put in multiple commands in the parens like an echo or whatever. Also note that build_fail is defined as:
:build_fail
echo ********** BUILD FAILURE **********
exit /b 1
This is not exactly the answer to the question, but I end up here every time I want to find out how to get my batch file to exit with and error code when a process returns an nonzero code.
So here is the answer to that:
if %ERRORLEVEL% NEQ 0 exit %ERRORLEVEL%