I thought I’d throw this up real quick, because I am constantly using for loops in bash during normal command traversal, but I am not as familiar about how to do them in Windows – off the top, I can recall cmd has for loops, they omit done, use parens and % in place of squee-bracks and $, but still have to look up syntax basically every time. I’m sure Powershell is more powerful, being a real programming language, and all, (and MacOS is certified Unix), but also quite a bit more verbose, even if it’s less weird-looking than bash. Through my own experience, I’ve a theory that terminal-dwellers, more often than not, have shell Stockholm syndrome for the one who brought them to the dance, regardless if they’re puking peppermint schnapps while being noticeably hands-y in public. And even if it tended to leave us utterly mortified in the beginning, it’s Christmas cane sexual predation vomit we intuitively manage.

So anyway, when I’m tired of invoking get-help for every command while using Windows, I’m quick to scrap the real programming language of pwsh for bizarre, old cmd, because its comparable legacy bonkers makes me feel more at home. As long as my feelings don’t grow too complex for you, cmd, we’ll get by with your start, and shell, and REM, which still makes no sense to me to this day, and that’s just fine. There’s that @ECHO OFF thing, which is totally unintuitive – I mean, gosh, how is anyone supposed to guess what that does? I’ll never know. And your fucking forward slashes drive me up a wall, but it’s still ok, because you don’t speak in complete sentences, and that’s just too weird, even for me.

Ahem. The vcredists-all package in the chocolatey repo appeared broken some time ago while I was bootstrapping a new machine that was light on runtimes since it was, well … new, so I set out on a clandestine mission to find for-loop bliss, with cmd as the caretaker, executing all vc runtime installers I amassed manually in a satisfyingly automated succession.

I visited the official Microsoft site with all the VC Redistributable packages and mouse-fondled the ones marked explicitly not deprecated. Thankfully, they were easy to find, since this story is definitely not about stretching one’s imagination. As of the time I write about, there were 8 in total between x86 and x86_64 (or, win32 and WoW64, I believe, is the Microsoft vernacular. God, they’re weird).

I proceeded to rename them to uniqueness with the familiar and irritatingly manual F2 keypresses in explorer, since I’d wound up with only vc_redist (n).exe -named files through the download process (thanks, Internet Explorer). I’d already forgotten that ren is CMD-speak for mv, and since help documents were beyond my effort level, I opted for the click-bait of the graphical user interface I would otherwise take pains to avoid. Perhaps this renaming step was onerous and unnecessary, given I was assuredly set to delete them after tumbling about together in the bushes, but, as my grandmother used to tell me, hindsight always keeps one from prison.

I dared not leave whitespace characters in a single one of the filenames, but since I’d made each unique, it’s possible my concern was overblown specifically by a set double-quotes. If you have Save As set in your browser, you could save each file with a unique name after download, and ensure they exist peacefully in a single folder hierarchy.

Then, I extrapolated dir to list vc_redist*.exe files singly with a wily /B flag. It’s not that dir was acting brash, but its option flag, “bare listing”, is undeniably suggestive. Apparently bare in this context is without extra information, and each filename being listed on its own line, like our tragically gone, but not forgotten, $(ls -1). I mustered the strength not to cry for my loss, and choke-blathered the expression:

C:\User\Downloads> for %i in (vc*.exe) do cmd /c %i

Like a miracle, it opened each runtime installer, one by one, without any additional intervention – that is, if you don’t count all the irritating graphical requests for interaction for which Windows is so famous, and me cursing myself for forgetting those damn installer packages often have automation-friendly command-line options.

Yay, as I write this, I feel the true curse of the computer user: The labor-saving device I imagined whisking me away to an easier life was probably far more laborious than clicking on each installer icon, especially considering the file renaming step born out of fright similarity or whitespaces would doom my working twice as hard for half the reward to failure.

But, I must say, the short, taudry escapade of cmd-syntax for loop lustiness gave me the sense estranged lovers often feel returning home, such as “why on earth did I do that?”, and “what in god’s name was I thinking?”, inevitably landing on an unconvincing resolve of, “If I hadn’t done it, I’d never know.”

And, serious apologies: Next time I have the unfortunate occasion to use a Windows machine, I’ll be sure to figure out how to create less dialog.