dos scripting question

Working on a hardware/software inventory project for a museum.  For budget reasons they can't afford to buy software to do the data collection.  As an intern they basically dropped the project in my lap and told me to have fun.

I could just write the project proposal to have each department fill out a paper form for each computer they own, which basically means interns in other departments will do my work for me.  However I've decided to cobble together something to do the data collection for them (also saving me the trouble of data entry).

I've written a batch file to take care of the data collection on each local computer.  Now I'm wondering how I'm going to process all these files once they all get sent back to me.  One idea I have is to put all the data files(hopefully with unique names) into one directory, route the results of a DIR into a .txt file then sequentially operate on the file matching each of the names in the .txt file.

Anyone have any better ideas or suggestions on another way to do this?  I've worked with C++, Java, and VB but I haven't done anything with them involving working with directories or files.

>>5
It is DOS,  I'm calling Microsoft applications from the command line to generate log files in .txt format.  The only real DOS command I'm using so far is copy.

>>6
I'm writing it with DOS and some .vbs because thats what I know how to use.  The data comes out in the format used by the Microsoft regedit.exe and winmsd.exe applications.  I have another batch file that checks for the existence of the regedit output files then writes a 0 or 1 in the summary.txt file on the appropriate line.  Alternatively I could have just output the entire HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ tree and parsed it, but this seemed easier.  I will have to write something to parse the winmsd.exe output though.


The problem isn't processing the data for the individual computers, thats more or less done.  The problem is processing all of the reports generated by all 200+ computers.  The name.vbs script at the top of the batch file should get them to generate a unique name for each computer's report, but once I receive them all I'm trying to figure out how to process them into a single file that I'm in turn going to feed into a database, which I'm researching how to do right now too.

I'm just glad I don't have to do this for the Macs littered around the grounds, apparently one of the department heads already took care of it.