I wonder how you can make in MS-DOS a command substitution Command substitution is a very powerful concept of the UNIX shell. It is used to insert the output of one command into a second command. E.g. with an assignment: $ today=$(date) # starts the "date" command, captures its output $ echo "$today" Mon Jul 26 13:16:02 MEST 2004 This can also be used with other commands besides assignments: $ echo "Today is $(date +%A), it's $(date +%H:%M)" Today is Monday, it's 13:21 This calls the date command two times, the first time to print the week-day, the second time for the current time. I need to know to do that in MS-DOS, (I already know that there is a way to perform something like that using as part of the for command, but this way is much more obfuscated and convoluted