Hi Doug-

I'm stumped, too.

The output to tmp0.txt is the same as yours.


Hmm... I copy/pasted that directly from Notepad into empty code brackets, but there are twice as many carriage returns shown in what I've pasted.
The text in Notepad looks like this-

(empty line)
Pinging google.com [74.125.224.112] with 32 bytes of data:
(empty line)
Reply from 74.125.224.112: bytes=32 time=19ms TTL=56
(empty line)
Ping statistics for 74.125.224.112:
(tab) Packets: Sent = 1, Received = 1, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
(tab) Minimum = 19ms, Maximum = 19ms, Average = 19ms
(empty line)

It seems to me that the type and echo commands are putting in too many 'new lines' than just what the data I want requires. Then the paste command just takes everything in each file (including the too-many lines) and concatenates.

If you have a handy excel trick for moving every x item from one column into another column, I could just re-organize the raw data in excel instead of worrying about the proper data accumulation technique.

~sigh~ Thanks for thinking with me.

additional:
After playing around with some of the parameters for cut and paste, I still had no different result to show for it.
The original batch file has morphed into this structure (my last attempt)
:pinger
ping -n 1 google.com > tmp0.txt
echo %date%, %time:~0,5%, >>pings.csv
type tmp0.txt | find "loss" | cut -f 2 -d "(" | cut -f 1 -d ")" | cut -f 1,2 -d " " >>pings.csv
echo , >>pings.csv
type tmp0.txt | find "Average" | cut -f 4 -d "=" | cut -f 2 -d " " | cut -f 1 -d " " >>pings.csv
echo , >>pings.csv
sleep 3
goto pinger

This structure removed the paste command entirely, relying on addenda to the .csv file each go-round.