I'm trying to accomplish the following ridiculous task:

I have a text file containing a set of fully qualified filesnames. I want to iterate through the file and append each line to a common variable, that can be passed to a command line tool. For example, the file might be:

C:\dir\test.txt

C:\WINDOWS\test2.txt

C:\text3.txt

and I'd like to assign them to some variable 'a' such that:

a = "C:\dir\test.txt C:\WINDOWS\test2.txt C:\text2.txt"

A secondary question is - what is a good batch file reference? I'm finding some stuff in the Windows material, and a lot of home-grown websites, but nothing particularly complete.

Thanks!