How to get the window title text from batch file

Question

How can I get the value of the current window's title, set like this:

TITLE Here Are The New Contents

Answer 1

In cmd.exe (usual command line prompt):

Set window's title:

title "Your New Title"

Get window's title: I didn't found anything useful to do such thing, However if you have some knowledge with C# or Visual Basic, you can develop a little program that will look in opened windows to find your command line and return the title for you. (using the PID of parent process (your cmd.exe))

In Powershell: (things are easy here)

Set window's title:

[system.console]::title = "Your New Title"

Get window's title:

$myTitleVar = [system.console]::title

or you can output it directly:

[system.console]::title

Answer 2

There's nothing built in, but you can retrieve it from the tasklist command.

tasklist /fi "imagename eq cmd.exe" /fo list /v

Answer 3

Calling PowerShell from your batch file via its CLI, powershell.exe, is easiest:

:: Outputs the window title.
powershell -noprofile -c [Console]::Title | findstr .

Note:

• [Console]::Title returns the current console window's title using the System.Console .NET class; PowerShell provides access to all .NET types.

• The findstr . command is a dummy command, which is necessary to prevent the output from containing a - <command-line> suffix, owing to the fact that cmd.exe appends such a suffix to the window title while a command line is executing (<command-line> here represents the specific command line invoked).
  Appending a suffix does not happen if a pipeline (|) is used, so the addition of | findstr . exe - which simply passes (non-empty) output through - is enough to prevent a suffix from showing in the result.

Complete example that shows how to capture the title in a variable:

@echo off & setlocal

:: Assign a custom title.
title This ^& That

:: Retrieve the current title and store it var. %thisTitle%
for /f "delims=" %%t in (
  'powershell -noprofile -c [Console]::Title ^| findstr .'
) do set thisTitle=%%t

echo This window's title: "%thisTitle%"

The above yields:

This window's title: "This & That"

---

More cumbersome alternative via wmic and tasklist:

Note:

• The ingredients for this solution are in AtomicFireball's answer and a comment on it, but how to put them all together may not be obvious. The code below does that.

• As you can see, the solution is much more complex compared to the PowerShell solution; note that using powershell.exe with the -c (-Command) parameter is not subject to the infamous PowerShell execution policy, so there should be no concern about using PowerShell for this task.

Complete example (same output as above):

:: Assign a custom title.
title This ^& That

:: Find the PID (process ID) of this cmd.exe session.
:: Note: A *temporary file* is required to capture the command output,
::       for later parsing. A `for /f` command cannot be used DIRECTLY
::       because it would execute the command in a *child* cmd.exe process, 
::       which would report the wrong PID.
:: Get a path for a temporary file.
set TEMPFILE=~getpid_%DATE%%TIME%.txt
set TEMPFILE=%TEMPFILE:/=%
set TEMPFILE=%TEMPFILE::=%
set TEMPFILE=%TEMP%\%TEMPFILE: =%
WMIC process get Name,ParentProcessId | findstr "^WMIC\.exe" > "%TEMPFILE%"
for /f "tokens=2" %%i in (%TEMPFILE%) do set PID=%%i
del "%TEMPFILE%"

:: Now use the PID to look up process details, which includes the window title.
for /f "tokens=1,* delims=:" %%i in (
  'tasklist /fi "PID eq %PID%" /fo list /v ^| findstr "^Window Title:'
) do set thisTitle=%%j
:: Trim the leading space:
for /f "tokens=*" %%i in ("%thisTitle%") do set thisTitle=%%i

echo This window's title: "%thisTitle%"

Answer 4

Or for short as a batch function:

rem # Assign a custom title.
title This ^& That

rem # Retrieve the current title.

CALL :getWindowTitle windowTitle
ECHO windowTitle="%windowTitle%".
GOTO :EOF

:getWindowTitle titlevar
    SETLOCAL
    FOR /f "usebackq delims=" %%t IN (`powershell -noprofile -c "[system.console]::title"`) DO SET "thisTitle=%%t"
    ENDLOCAL&CALL SET "%~1=%thisTitle%"
GOTO :EOF

Answer 5

powershell ( Get-WmiObject Win32_Process -Filter ProcessId=$PID ).ParentProcessId