Scheduled Folder Cleanup - Batch File - batch-file

Question

I am currently working at my first Junior IT position, and I am having trouble with a simple batch file.
Essentially the file is ran weekly through the task scheduler. It removes files and folders from a server directory that are older than 8 days. It is also supposed to remove empty folders.
forfiles /p "P:\blahblah" /s /m * /d -8 /c "cmd /c del /Q /S /F /A #path"
cd /d P:\blahblah
for /f "usebackq" %%d in (`"dir /ad/b/s | sort /R"`) do rd "%%d"
REM robocopy "P:\blahblah" "P:\blahblah" /s /move"
There are two problems here;
It will occasionally delete files only a few days old.
It will not remove empty folders.
The file was written by an old junior IT employee and there is no documentation. My guess is multiple methods were used in order to ensure the cleanup (ironically). I have searched google and here are my current thoughts on each command..
1) forfiles - the forfiles command seems to be written correctly and I do not see any issues with it.
2) cd - simple enough
3) for - not entirely sure. The batch variables are new to me and I am not sure if it is working correctly.
4) robocopy - I have not been able to find an instance online where someone copies a directory to itself for cleanup. I also notice the extra quotation in there, but i am not certain of its incorrectness. This line especially seems odd to me.
Normally I would try and test my through something like this, but It is a bit harder to test quickly given I need to see if it is removing things based on calendar date. That's why I am here!
I promise I would not have asked if I had not already scoured the internet for an idea. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I would love to learn a little more about the above commands!
Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

forfiles
Being syntactically correct doesn't mean it does what you want, it does what you ask. Here the problem is the del command. It will delete what the forfiles has selected, but you should test the selected element is not a folder. If you call del /q /s /f /a with a folder reference, you delete the folder contents.
cd
Simple enough, but as you don't check the operation was sucessful (maybe P: is not available) maybe the following for command removes information where it should not.
for
As Squashman comments, if you change the back quotes into single quotes you will not need the usebackq.
But you need the delims clause to avoid problems with paths containing spaces. for /f does not iterate over file references, but over lines of text (in this case generated by a dir command). By default tabs and spaces are delimiters that split the lines being processed and, also by default, only the first token is retrieved. Setting the delims clause to an empty list of characters will disable this behaviour.
You can try with something like
#echo off
setlocal enableextensions disabledelayedexpansion
pushd "p:\blahblah" && (
forfiles /s /m * /d -8 /c "cmd /c if #isdir==FALSE del /q /f /a #path"
for /f "delims=" %%d in ('" dir /ad /s /b | sort /R "') do rd "%%d"
popd
)
The pushd will change the current active directory to the required one. If the command is sucessful, the conditional operator && (execute next command if the previous one did not fail) will execute the rest of the code, restoring the active directory at the end.
4) robocopy
It can be used to do the clean, but not from a folder into itself.
#echo off
setlocal enableextensions disabledelayedexpansion
pushd "p:\blahblah" && (
rem Use a random temporary folder
for %%t in ("%temp%\clean_%random%%random%%random%%random%.tmp") do (
rem Select the files to keep
robocopy "." "%%~ft" /MAXAGE:8 /CREATE /s /njh /njs /nfl /nc /ns
rem Remove anything not selected
robocopy "%%~ft" "." /NOCOPY /PURGE /e /njh /njs /nfl /nc /ns
rem remove temporary folder
) & rd /s /q "%%~ft"
rem Restore previous active directory
popd
)
This code creates a replica of all the selected files (not older than 8 days) into a temporary folder, but the /CREATE switch tells robocopy to not copy the files, but to create 0 bytes files into the temporary target.
Once we have a replica with only the selected elements, the oposite operation is done, from temporary folder into work folder but requesting that no copy operation should be done (/NOCOPY), just a removal of elements not present in source (/PURGE).