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up vote 9 down vote favorite
3
 
...
for /F %%F in ('dir /B %* 2> nul') do (
...

What I'm attempting to do here is discard the err output of the command (and loop over the stdout output). However, it complains:

2> was unexpected at this time.

Is this some way to achieve this?

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up vote 19 down vote accepted

in this case you need to escape the > like this

for /F %%F in ('dir /B %* 2^> nul') do (
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1  
Microsoft uses an intern to implement the command shell and we have to live with it for the rest of our lives... – bambams Jun 10 '15 at 17:14
up vote -5 down vote

I believe you need a delimiting space between the "2" and the ">". Without that delimiter my dir test output still displayed on the screen. Furthermore, I believe that by sending the output of the dir command to null will not provide any data back for the set to process.

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2  
No. Changing 2> to 2 > would redirect STDOUT instead of STDERR, thus preventing the processing of the actual directory listing. As @RGuggisberg correctly pointed out, the redirection operator must be escaped in the nested command. – Ansgar Wiechers Jun 14 '13 at 17:22

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