batch

https://ss64.com/nt/

 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14952295/set-output-of-a-command-as-a-variable-with-pipes

 

The lack of a Linux-like backtick/backquote facility is a major annoyance of the pre-PowerShell world. Using backquotes via for-loops is not at all cosy. So we need kinda of setvar myvar cmd-line command.

In my %path% I have a dir with a number of bins and batches to cope with those Win shortcomings.

One batch I wrote is:

:: setvar varname cmd
:: Set VARNAME to the output of CMD
:: Triple escape pipes, eg:
:: setvar x  dir c:\ ^^^| sort 
:: -----------------------------

@echo off
SETLOCAL

:: Get command from argument 
for /F "tokens=1,*" %%a in ("%*") do set cmd=%%b

:: Get output and set var
for /F "usebackq delims=" %%a in (`%cmd%`) do (
     ENDLOCAL
     set %1=%%a
)

:: Show results 
SETLOCAL EnableDelayedExpansion
echo %1=!%1! 

So in your case, you would type:

> setvar text echo Hello
text=Hello 

The script informs you of the results, which means you can:

> echo text var is now %text%
text var is now Hello 

You can use whatever command:

> setvar text FIND "Jones" names.txt

What if the command you want to pipe to some variable contains itself a pipe?
Triple escape it, ^^^|:

> setvar text dir c:\ ^^^| find "Win"