System Variables

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	Macro Express: System Variables

There are some useful variables in the Variable Set from Misc command but I find using the oft forgotten System Variables are more useful. You have probably seen them before and may have even used them back in the DOS days. They look like %windir% and in this case is your Windows directory. The nice thing is that on various systems you might se Windows installed in the c:\win, c:\windows, c:\winnt, and so on. Also it's a nice shorthand so you can write %temp% instead of "C:\Users\user.domain\AppData\Local\Temp".

As I said Variable Set from Misc does these as well but when I can I use system variables instead. Two reasons are that they are more recognizable like %temp% instead of %T34% and they don't take up and of the limited text variables. Also if you want to test your command manually you can just paste it into a run line.

There are many places online to find these but I'll list a couple of favorites here:

	%Temp%
	%WinDir%
	%UserProfile%
	%AllUsersProfile%
	%ComSpec% Useful when you don't know if it's cmd.exe or command.exe
	%TZ% TimeZone
	%ProgramFiles%
	%OS%
	%UserName%
	%Domain%

If you look in your System Properties you can find quite a few. But I warn against this as often these are per machine and might not be used universally. Also this is not a complete list.

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