How to get and use your local IP address in a Windows 7 (and Vista) batch command file

If, like me, you spend a lot of time on a variety of customer sites, you will probably be familiar with the issues around swapping networks. I’ve already blogged about the problems with Windows 7, Vista and Firefox proxy settings and I will do some more articles on getting on with problematic proxies later. However, I wanted to let people know how to get hold of your IP address from within a batch (command) file.

Note the space after the : on line 3. The FOR command used twice here splits the text output from what is in the () after the “in” using the defined delimiters (“:” and space in the 1st case, “.” in the 2nd). In the first FOR statement, we take element number 13 only, it ends up in variable %%i. In the second case, we take elements number 1 to 4, they go into variables %%a, %%b, %%c, %%d. Now you have not only the full address but also the componants so if you wanted to check whether you were in a particular class C network, you could do something like:

That would check if your local IP address is between 10.97.100.1 and 10.97.199.254 Note that I’ve used the enhanced FOR statement – the “usebakq” makes the FOR statement more like a UNIX type one where commands are enclosed in back-quotes (`). This certainly works for Windows 7 and should, I think, work for Vista. Prior to Vista, you would need to do things differently anyway. At the very least you would have to search for “IP Address” in the FIND statement as IPCONFIG didn’t include IPv6 information. Now that you have everything in place, you can control the proxy settings for each application that needs access out of the local network. I’ll blog about that another time.

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