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I dumped all the physical network GUIDs to a file via: 

wmic nic where "PhysicalAdapter = 'TRUE'" get GUID > networkAdapterGUIDs.txt

When I try to read the file and echo out its contents nothing happens:

for /F "tokens=*" %%A in (networkAdapterGUIDs.txt) do echo %%A

I have tried %%A with .bat files and just %A when running on the command line.

Here's a screenshot of what I'm seeing:

http://puu.sh/6Geyn/c09d1ad079.png

If I could get a simple echo to work I later planned to do something with the lines that have the GUID on them and omit/skip the first line.

I launched up a fresh Windows 8.1 virtual machine and had the same experience. I am currently running Windows 8.

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  • cmd tools used to have (and obviously still have) problems with Unicode output produced by tools like wmic. Try to do simple type networkAdapterGUIDs.txt >fixed.txt (I think more also works but I'm not sure) and then run your loop over the 'fixed' file. If it helps I will put this as an answer
    – wmz
    Commented Feb 1, 2014 at 18:43
  • Found out that I could skip the file creation and just pass the command into for for /F %%x IN ('wmic nic where "PhysicalAdapter = 'TRUE'" get GUID') I'm still interested why I couldn't get it to read from a file though, although as you pointed out it could definitely be a file encoding problem
    – CTS_AE
    Commented Feb 1, 2014 at 18:49
  • I just tried what you said and that worked as well : ) thanks. wmic spit out UCS-2 Little Endian, and type spit out UTF-8 without BOM, checked with notepad++ That was going to drive me crazy; would have never question the file encoding. At that point I was sure that Windows 8 had some issues with its for loop file reading, glad to know it doesn't.
    – CTS_AE
    Commented Feb 1, 2014 at 18:55
  • just be careful as you may also get unexpected results when running wmic directly from within for (its output contains chars treated as control by batch engine)
    – wmz
    Commented Feb 1, 2014 at 18:57
  • Yeah I've been noticing that I'm having some issues with the empty line it throws in at the end even though I have the /F option
    – CTS_AE
    Commented Feb 1, 2014 at 19:27

1 Answer 1

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cmd tools used to have (and obviously still have) problems with Unicode output produced by tools like wmic. Try to do simple type networkAdapterGUIDs.txt >fixed.txt and then run your loop over the 'fixed' file

Rob van der Woude's page has also excellent section on those [conversions]

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