Once again I find myself a slightly better Windows script writer thanks the excellent reference pages provided by ss64.com. The particular situation I was stumped by, is wanting to be able to set a variable to the contents of another variable rather than the variable name. The answer? Use 3 percent signs in a loop.

:: Notice that to evaluate the contents of %pc1%
:: requires triple ‘%’ symbols i.e CALL SET _pc_name=%%%_pc_name%%%

This is one CALL I’m very happy to have made.

What was my goal? To estimate the number of indexable documents in use on our shared departmental fileserver, in order to get an idea of what size of Google Mini or search appliance we might need. My humble results here: count_types.cmd.