Get last command line argument in windows batch file

Question

I need to get last argument passed to windows batch script, how can I do that?

Answer 1

The easiest and perhaps most reliable way would be to just use cmd's own parsing for arguments and shift then until no more are there.

Since this destroys the use of %1, etc. you can do it in a subroutine:

@echo off
call :lastarg %*
echo Last argument: %LAST_ARG%
goto :eof

:lastarg
  set "LAST_ARG=%~1"
  shift
  if not "%~1"=="" goto lastarg
goto :eof

Answer 2

This will get the count of arguments:

set count=0
for %%a in (%*) do set /a count+=1

To get the actual last argument, you can do

for %%a in (%*) do set last=%%a

Note that this will fail if the command line has unbalanced quotes - the command line is re-parsed by for rather than directly using the parsing used for %1 etc.