How to get Current Date - 1, -2 ,-3 , -4 in Batch - date

Question

This is what i would like to do:
Get Current Date, which is easy --- %DATE%
DO Current Date - 1, which i cant seem to get as i have tried different options.
I would like to get last 4 dates from the current date and then store them in 4 different variables. Then Convert each of these date into YYYYMMDD format.
So %DATE% gives me 06/04/2016.....
%DATE%
-1 should give me 05/04/2016 stored in Variable say Date1........
-2 should give me 04/04/2016 stored in Variable say Date2........
-3 should give me 03/04/2016 stored in Variable say Date3........
-4 should give me 02/04/2016 stored in Variable say Date4........
then i would like to convert value stored in each of these variables into YYYYMMDD
For ex:
05/04/2016 to 20160405 ....
04/04/2016 to 20160404 ....
03/04/2016 to 20160403 ....
02/04/2016 to 20160402 ....

Answer 1

with a little help from powershell:
#echo off
for /l %%d in (0,1,4) do (
for /f "tokens=*" %%i in ('powershell get-date -date $(get-date^).adddays(-%%d^) -format yyyyMMdd') do set _Date%%d=%%i
)
set _date
Explanation (copied word by word from TessellatingHeckler's comment - couldn't formulate it better):
for /L is a batch file loop which counts numbers, 1 2 3 4, and each
time through it calls PowerShell script engine with a for /f command
which is a bit of a batch file workaround. The PowerShell command gets
the current date, adds -X days to it, then gets the resulting date,
and formats it in the way you want and returns it to the batch file,
which gets one line of text back, and uses that in the do section to
set the environment variable. tokens=* tells the loop not to split the
line of text up, and the ^ are to escape special characters in batch
files
for /l works like this: for /l %%i in (<start>, <step>, <end>). In other languages it would read something like FOR i=<start> TO <end> STEP <step>
The powershell command assembles like this:
get-date - get today's date.
get-date -date <some date> get the date of <some date> (seems absurd, but in fact means "take the string <some date> and convert it to a valid date").
Now replace <some date> with $(get-date).adddays(x) - which means "take today, and add x days"
last step is formatting the resulting date to the desired format with -format <formatstring>
you can read powershell's help from cmd with powershell get-help get-date or more detailed: powershell Get-Help Get-Date -Online