Ah, that brought back memories, though not useful ones. My batch code skills are pining for the fjords.

I have a DOS version of the awk utility somewhere, which I used to use for processing the lists of newsgroup names I got from my ISP's news server. Also a version of the gsort utility. But it's been quite a few years since I did anything complicated.

These days, people recommend Perl, and I recoil in horror. I shall have to look into Python: there are standalone versions as well as Poser's internal interpreter.