Windows Batch setting PATH through loop

Question

I'm trying to create a drive with a suite of programs that can be implemented through the command prompt.

My issue is setting the PATH environment variable to include paths to the program suite. Since there are a couple directories for these suites (and I'm constantly adding more), I am trying to get it so I can have a .ini file be parsed through a simple Batch script and returned. From this I want to take the path parsed from the .ini file and append it to my current PATH variable.

This is the current script I'm trying to get fixed.

FOR /F "delims=" %%i IN ('call %cd:~0,3%\initTermPort\parse.ini.bat %cd:~0,3%\initTermPort\config.ini Alternate _path') DO (
    SET PATH="%PATH%;%cd:~0,3%%%i"
)

The call to parse.ini.bat is getting the next path in config.ini on every run. For example:

If I substitute SET PATH="%PATH%;%cd:~0,3%%%i" with ECHO %%i I get the following output:

E:\> (ECHO ~\bin)
~\bin

E:\>(ECHO ~\library\bin)
~\library\bin

But for some reason SET PATH="%PATH%;%cd:~0,3%%%i" is not setting the PATH at all.

Any help is appreciated.

MC ND · Accepted Answer · 2014-05-22 06:41:25Z

The problem is that when the for code block (the code enclosed in parenthesis) was parsed, all the read operations to variables were replaced with the value in the variable before starting to execute, and in each iteration what is used is this initial value, and not the value inside the variable during the execution.

If you change a variable inside a block of code and need to access the changed value inside the same block of code, you need to enable delayed expansion and change the syntax to access the variables to use !varName! instead of %varName%. This indicates to the parser that this read operation must be delayed.

setlocal enableextensions enabledelayedexpansion
....
FOR /F "delims=" %%i IN (
    'call %cd:~0,3%\initTermPort\parse.ini.bat %cd:~0,3%\initTermPort\config.ini Alternate _path'
) DO (
    SET "PATH=!PATH!;%cd:~0,3%%%i"
)

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