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How can I execute multiple commands in the Windows commandline with just a single line?

So for example say I want to perform an SVN update and then copy all of the files to another location...

svn update; copy *.* c:\development\copy\

That doesn't work obviously. Is there a character or delimiter like ';' to perform something like this?

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3 Answers

up vote 42 down vote accepted

Yes there is. It's &.

&& will execute command 2 when command 1 is complete providing it didn't fail, & will execute regardless.

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3  
& and && only work in Windows' cmd.exe - which is not DOS. – grawity Oct 30 '09 at 15:21
6  
'DOS' as a term is often used to describe cmd, and seeing as the op uses svn I highly doubt he's still using DOS. No need to be pedantic :) – Phoshi Oct 30 '09 at 15:37
There: urlencode.blogspot.com/2009/06/vista-desktop-june-09.html He uses Windows XP. Certainly not DOS (it never looked that good ;)) – Phoshi Oct 30 '09 at 15:45
5  
I think it's safe to assume that when anyone mentions "DOS", they really mean "Windows Command Prompt". I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that most people probably don't use DOS much these days. Thanks for the correction - it's just a bit unnecessary in this day and age. – Murdoch Ripper Nov 5 '09 at 4:35

At least in MS-DOS 6.22 I used to use the key Ctrl+T to get a kind of paragraph symbol. This worked just like the & mentioned by Phoshi. This will only work however, if you have doskey.exe running.

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In case you want to wrap the first command with an if but would still like the second command to execute regardless then then you have to wrap the if with a cmd /c as well like this:

cmd /c if exist abc. (rd /q abc) & echo hello

If you don't prefix the if with cmd /c then the whole command becomes part of if (which you may not want).

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