Hello all!


Some of you batch gurus will be able to point out some
pitfalls I've missed, but let me explain first what this is
about.

I email out a little weekly journal newsletter to a group of ham radio folks I
work with, our common interest assisting
vessels at sea, folks serving their country or faith abroad, etc.

One thing I've always wanted to implement was a bit of a
history section, keyed by date.  These go out on Sunday
mornings, of course.

This batch would run at midnight utc on Sunday of course adn prepare the
history information, compiling into it a file
that the weekly email generator code would find.

So, taking this Sunday's for example, the batch would look
in a defined directory for files named 0115.txt; 0116.txt; 0117 ... etc.

Easy enough done, stuff number of month and day into an env
var called %NEWS% using HOrst's logecho.
OF course I'm using HOrst's nset and count, as well as
ifnumber in this thing.

The first thing we need to do is see if the date's getting
toward roll over to next month.
That one's easy.  Check if day of the month is 22 or
greater.

IF the date is 22 or greater we then  need to create a
"turnover" file which will be used to create another
environment variable.

So here's how we're accomplishing that so far.  the fun
comes once we've defined all this.
We start the set up for it to do its beautiful work like
this:


:: 300hist.bat
@echo off
:: desc:  This batch is under construction
:: desc:  function:  Runs on Sundays 0000 utc or is triggered at that time. ::
desc:  helps us grab historic trivia for weekly journal
logecho $D | nset starter=$1
set checker=22
ifnumber %STARTER% biggerequivalthan %CHECKER > nul
if errorlevel 1 goto workit
:: if starter is bigger or equal to checker we may need to
:: turn over to a new month.  IF not, we just cruise along.


set starter=
set checker=
goto regular
:workit
set starter=
set checker=
logecho $M | nset bump=$1
:: now we use HOrst's count to add one.

count BUMP +1
set checknum=10
:: environment variables are stored ignoring leading zeroes
:: unless you stuff them in.  So we set checker to 10 and
:: test for smaller than, because if %BUMP% os a somg;e
:: digit we need to add a zero.
:: we're going to create a file to use to capture
:: data for the environment variable at turnover of month.
ifnumber %BUMP% smallerthan %CHECKNUM% > nul
if errorlevel 1 goto addzero
goto doit
:addzero
set checknum=
echo 0%BUMP%01 >> bumper.txt
set bump=
goto workout
:doit
set checknum=
echo %BUMP%01 >> bumper.txt
set bump=
goto workout
:workout
cd \working


:: now we see how many days are in the current month, so
:: that we turn over at the appropriate place utilizing the
:: file bumper.txt we created to set the new %NEWS%
:: env var for the appropriate day's history capture.
:: we already have repnum.txt with the data inside.  HEnce:
nset repnum=$1 > turnover.txt
set repnum=
nset turnover=$1