Kavinda Munasinghe’s Blog

Recently a friend needed to pass a value from a vbscript to a batch file which called the vbscript.

I’ve never had to do this before so after a little bit of head scratching, googling and few rounds of trial/error we managed to solve the problem.

In the process we came across three ways to get a return value of the vbscript into the batch file.

1. Using the “Wscript.Quit” and “%errorlevel%” environment variable
In our script we could use the Quit method to return a integer value when exiting and read that value in our batch file using the %errorlevel% environment variable of the command shell.

   
    Script file myScript.vbs:
    ‘Do something.
    ‘
    ‘Exit with a purpose!
    Wscript.Quit(65)

    Batch file myBatch.bat:
    REM Run the script.
    myScript.vbs
    REM Do something with the return value.
    echo %errorlevel%

   
This may not look to be interesting at first, but it is possible to get a little creative and use it to pass a drive letter from a script to the command shell.


2. Using a third file to store the result
This somehow seemed uninteresting. But it could do the trick. First we write the our return value from the script to a file, and then in the batch file we read the contents of the file.

    Script file myScript.vbs:
    Dim oFilesys, oFiletxt, sFilename, returnValue
    ‘Do something, and return something
    returnValue=”cool Result!“
    ‘Write a return value to a file
    Set oFilesys = CreateObject(”Scripting.FileSystemObject”)
    Set oFiletxt = oFilesys.CreateTextFile(”returnValue.txt”, True)
    oFiletxt.WriteLine(returnValue)
    oFiletxt.Close
    ‘Exit
    WScript.Quit(0)


    Batch file myBatch.bat:
    REM Run the script
    myScript.vbs
    REM Read the return value
    FOR /F %%i in (returnValue.txt) do echo %%i


3. Using “WScript.Echo” with “FOR /F”
Here is what we ended up with, instead of writing anything to a fille, we can just use WScript.Echo to tell the script to spit out the result and then use the For command to read it. Nice and easy!

    Script file myScript.vbs:
    ‘Do something, and return something
    WScript.Echo “cool Result!”
    ‘Exit
    WScript.Quit(0)

    Batch file myBatch.bat:
    REM Run the script and read the return value
    For /F “delims=#” %%i  in (’cscript //nologo c:\myScript.vbs’) do echo %%i

Here the For will execute the ‘cscript //nologo c:\myScript.vbs’ and read the output. Make sure to add the //nologo unless you want to  banner from cscript to also appear as the result. Also if the result contains spaces or tabs, you will need to set the “delims=” because the default delimiter set is space and tab. If we had omitted this in the above example, the retVal would have only contained “cool”.

Any other interesting ways of doing this?