executing N times in bach an emacs macro - emacs

Question

I have an Emacs macro(named/saved) in a mymacro.el file
I would like to execute N times the macro in batch mode
like this:
emacs --batch -l ~/mymacro.el test.txt -f MyFoo
Question how to add N times in the lisp mymacro.el code ?
:-)

Answer 1

ErgoEmacs has a good page on this. What you want to do is reference the argv variable after calling emacs with the --script option. (elt argv 0) will give you the value of the first argument you specify. (elt argv 1) will give you the second argument, etc.
For example, let's say you call the following command:
emacs --script ~/mymacro.el ~/test.txt 22
Emacs will call the script ~/mymacro.el.
(elt argv 0) will give you "~/test.txt".
(elt argv 1) will give you "22".
(elt argv 3) will give you nil.
You can also use the variable command-line-args, outlined here.
To specifically batch-execute a macro a number of times, borrowing from this page on the wiki, we can create a script to run mymacro on a file, in the file run-mymacro.el:
;; Insert the macro here with `insert-kbd-macro`
(fset 'mymacro [...])
(defun : ()
(let ((file-name (elt argv 0))
(repeats (string-to-int (elt argv 1))))
(find-file file-name)
(condition-case nil
(execute-kbd-macro (symbol-function 'mymacro) repeats)
(error nil) )
(save-buffer) )
We can then call this script as so:
emacs --script ~/run-mymacro.el ~/test.txt 22
This will open the file ~/text.txt, run your macro 22 times and save the result. The original file should be saved in a backup with ~ at the end of the filename.
This is all untested, so it may need some tweaking before it works 100%.

Answer 2

As far as I understand your question, is it the case that you want to run the command emacs --batch -l ~/mymacro.el test.txt -f MyFoo N times?
If so, and if you are using Linux, it is easier to just use the for-loop of Linux shell.
#!/bin/bash
for i in {1..N} # replace N by your wanted number
do
emacs --batch -l ~/mymacro.el test.txt -f MyFoo
done