Getting single date values in Windows XP batch files

Here's a cute way to get the current dayfor use in a Windows XP batch file.

SET DOW=%date:~3,2%

What this does is set the DOW variable to be the two characters after the first three characters of the DATE system variable. On my (german) server this is a two digit value representing the current month of the year. NB The format of the date returned by the date variable is system locale dependent.