Excluding a directory in for loop's search - batch-file

I have the following line of code:
FOR /R D:\1_FOLDER %f IN (*.jpg,*.png) DO XCOPY %f D:\2_FOLDER /H /C
The first problem what i have, the command doesn't run, i get the error
Invalid numbers of parametres
The second problem in directory 1_FOLDER i have 2 more folders X_FOLDER and Y_FOLDER, i want the for loop to search only in X_FOLDER, and copy only files of the X_FOLDER.
I have the second problem same when i want to copy from C:\ , i want to exclude the Windows folder from for loop's search.

The error message comes from xcopy when you specify unquoted paths containing SPACE characters (or other token separators like ,, ;, =, TAB or non-break spaces (ASCII 0xFF)).
Anyway, actually I do not see any reason to use a for /R loop for the task at hand, because xcopy features an /EXCLUDE option. Here is an excerpt of the help test appearing when typing xcopy /?:
/EXCLUDE:file1[+file2][+file3]...
Specifies a list of files containing strings. Each string
should be in a separate line in the files. When any of the
strings match any part of the absolute path of the file to be
copied, that file will be excluded from being copied. For
example, specifying a string like \obj\ or .obj will exclude
all files underneath the directory obj or all files with the
.obj extension respectively.
So for your example, create a text file (let us call it exclusions.lst) with the following content:
D:\1_FOLDER\Y_FOLDER\
Alternatively, if you want every subdirectory called Y_FOLDER in any location to be excluded, write:
\Y_FOLDER\
Since you have multiple file patterns (*.jpg and *.png) to be processed, you could provide an xcopy command line for each of them (let xcopy do the recursion by using the appropriate switches, rather than wrapping a for /R loop around):
xcopy /C /H /K /S /I /EXCLUDE:exclusions.lst "D:\1_FOLDER\*.jpg" "D:\2_FOLDER"
xcopy /C /H /K /S /I /EXCLUDE:exclusions.lst "D:\1_FOLDER\*.png" "D:\2_FOLDER"
Or you could list the file patterns in another text file (let us call it patterns.lst):
*.jpg
*.png
Then you could use a for /F loop to read that file and feed each pattern/line to an xcopy command:
for /F "eol=| delims=" %%P in (patterns.lst) do (
xcopy /C /H /K /S /I /EXCLUDE:exclusions.lst "D:\1_FOLDER\%%~nxP" "D:\2_FOLDER"
)
Do not forget to replace each %% by % if you want to try this in command prompt (cmd) directly.
Both text files exclusions.lst and patterns.lst are expected to be in the current working directory.
Note that all methods shown here do not copy any empty directories from the source.
If you need advanced options for specifying filters to exclude or include certain files, you might be interested in the robocopy command.

Related

how to zip all files individually in all subfolders and remove original file after

what im looking for is a .bat file code to zip files individually in all subfolders in the current folder and then delete the of files after, to exclude already zipped/compressed files, what i dont want is folders to be zipped and i want the files to keep there name when zipped
i have a bunch of folders/files and the only code i found
#ECHO OFF
FOR %%i IN (*.*) DO (
ECHO "%%i" | FIND /I "batch zip files.bat" 1>NUL) || (
"c:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -tzip "%%~ni.zip" "%%i"
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 del "%%i"
)
)
zips all files in the current directory and doesnt touch subfolders
i'd appreciate it if anyone can do this for me as i can save a ton of space with all files zipped
The first issue you have with your provided code is that your For loop is only parsing files in the current directory, there is no recursion into subdirectories. To parse files within the subdirectories, I'd advise that you use a For /F loop, with the Dir command using its /B and /S options. I would also advise that you include the attribute option, /A, which will include every item, then omit those which you're not interested in. For instance, it's unlikely that you want to zip the directories, hidden files, reparse points, or system files. You can do that by excluding those attributes, /A:-D-H-L-S. To learn more about the For command, and the Dir command, open a Command Prompt window, type for /?, and press the ENTER key. You can then do the same for the Dir command, i.e for /?. As you have not defined a working directory at the start of your script, it will run against every file and directory in whatever is current at the time you run it. Because your code has a line excluding a file named batch zip files.bat, I'm going to assume that is the name of your running script, and that your intention is to therefore run the script against everything in the tree rooted from the same location as the batch file itself. To ensure that is always the case, for safety, I've defined that directory as the current directory from the outset, using the CD command, CD /D "%~dp0". %0 is a special batch file argument reference to itself, to learn more about this please take a look at the output from both call /?. You can also learn about the CD command entering cd /?, in a Command Prompt window too. To also omit your batch file, as you don't want it to be zipped and deleted, I've piped the results from the Dir command through FindStr, printing only items which do not exactly match the case insensitive literal string %~f0 (expanding to the full path of the batch file itself). Additionally, I've piped those results through another findstr.exe command to omit any files already carrying a .zip extension, as there's no point in zipping files which already zip files. (Please note however, that for more robust code, you should really check that those are zip archives and not just files carrying a misleading extension). The results from those commands are then passed one by one to the Do portion which includes your 7z.exe command. I've assumed at this stage, that your intention was to save the zipped archives to the same location as the originating files. To do that I've used variable expansion on %%G to stipulate its directory, path, and name, %%~dpnG, (see the usage information under for /? to recap). Upon successful completion of the archiving process, the original file will be deleted, to do that I appended the -sdel option to your original command string. Please be aware that you may want to include additional options, should you wish to update existing zip files etc. (use "%ProgramFiles%\7-Zip\7z.exe" -? in a Command Prompt window to see them). As I've not mentioned it previously, at the beginning of the script, I made sure that extensions were enabled. Whilst it is the default option, it's safer to be sure, as variable expansion and the commands CD, and For can be affected, if they're not.
Here's the code as explained above:
#Echo Off
SetLocal EnableExtensions
CD /D "%~dp0"
For /F "EOL=? Delims=" %%G In ('Dir "*" /A:-D-H-L-S /B /S 2^> NUL ^|
%SystemRoot%\System32\findstr.exe /I /L /V /X "%~f0" ^|
%SystemRoot%\System32\findstr.exe /E /I /L /V ".zip"'
) Do "%ProgramFiles%\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -tzip "%%~dpnG.zip" "%%G" -sdel
Looking at your question, which has changed from what you'd asked initially, you appear to not be interested in the files of the batch file directory any more, "zip files individually in all subfolders in the current folder". For that reason, I've provided the following alternative, methodology.
The difference is that I first of all use a For loop to include only directories in the current working location, /A:D-H-L-S, before running the same method used in my previous example, but with one difference. As we're now no longer zipping files in the current working directory, we can remove the findstr.exe command filtering out the running batch file:
#Echo Off
SetLocal EnableExtensions
CD /D "%~dp0"
For /F "EOL=? Delims=" %%G In ('Dir "*" /A:D-H-L-S /B 2^> NUL'
) Do For /F "EOL=? Delims=" %%H In ('Dir "%%G" /A:-D-H-L-S /B /S 2^> NUL ^|
%SystemRoot%\System32\findstr.exe /E /I /L /V ".zip"'
) Do "%ProgramFiles%\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -tzip "%%~dpnH.zip" "%%H" -sdel
Please be aware, that my answers above are to essentially correct your code attempt, and not a personal recommendation for speed, or in performing the task laid out in your question. Additionally, I have no idea what will happen if any of those files are in use/locked, and have made no attempt at checking for such scenarios.

CMD to delete a specific folder with files from multiple folder paths

I need a CMD batch file to delete all the log files.
My company makes plugins for their product and the path is something as follows:
C:/Program Files/product/../plugins/../plugin_Path/pluginOne/audit/log
C:/Program Files/product/../plugins/../plugin_Path/pluginOne/audit/log-archive
C:/Program Files/product/../Root/plugins/../plugin_Path/pluginTwo/audit/log
C:/Program Files/product/../Root/plugins/../plugin_Path/pluginTwo/audit/log-archive
Now I need to delete all the log and log-archive folders with its contains.
Currently I wrote a samll program like this:
#echo off
color 02
for %%A in (
"C:/Program Files/product/plugins/plugin_Path/pluginOne/audit/log"
"C:/Program Files/product/plugins/plugin_Path/pluginOne/audit/log-archive"
"C:/Program Files/product/plugins/plugin_Path/pluginTwo/audit/log"
"C:/Program Files/product/plugins/plugin_Path/pluginTwo/audit/log-archive"
) do (
del /Q %%A
echo Deleted %%A
)
echo All files deleted
pause
echo Program ended
But here I need to insert all the log paths manually.
I am looking for a solution where I could point the parent folder (say Program Files/Company) and it could traverse all the files inside and will delete all the log and log-archival folders with its contains.
I am a QA person have good QA experience but no experience on batch programming and I dont have much time and support team is not present. [Need help]. There are more than 1K log files are present.
First, as explained by the Microsoft documentation Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces, the directory separator on Windows is \ and not / as on Linux/Mac. / is used on Windows for options as you can see on your code for example on /Q. So use in future \ in file/folder paths. The Windows file system accessing kernel functions automatically replace all forward slashes by backslashes before accessing the file systems, but writing code depending on automatic error correction is never a good idea.
The task to delete all folders with name log or log-archive in a specified folder and all its subfolders can be done with a single command line.
#for /F "delims=" %%I in ('dir "%ProgramFiles%\product\plugins\plugin_Path\log*" /AD /B /S 2^>nul ^| %SystemRoot%\System32\findstr.exe /E /I /R "\\log \\log-archive"') do #rd /Q /S "%%I" 2>nul
FOR with option /F runs in a separate command process started with cmd.exe /C (more precise with %ComSpec% /C) in background the command line in '... ' which is here:
dir "C:\Program Files\product\plugins\plugin_Path\log*" /AD /B /S 2>nul | C:\Windows\System32\findstr.exe /E /I /R "\\log \\log-archive"
The command DIR outputs to handle STDOUT
in bare format because of option /B
just directories because of option /AD (attribute directory)
directory names matching the wildcard pattern log*
in specified directory C:\Program Files\product\plugins\plugin_Path
and all its subdirectories because of option /S
with full path also because of option /S.
It could be that DIR does not find any file system entry matching these criteria. In this case an error message is output by DIR to handle STDERR. This error output is redirected with 2>nul to device NUL to suppress it.
The standard output of DIR is redirected with | to handle STDIN of FINDSTR which runs
because of option /I a case-insensitive
regular expression find explicitly requested with option /R
for string \log or \log-archive (space is interpreted as OR)
which must be found at end of a line because of option /E.
All lines matching these search criteria are output by FINDSTR to handle STDOUT of background command process. This filtering of output of DIR with FINDSTR is necessary to avoid the deletion of a directory which is named for example LogToKeep also found and output by DIR.
Read the Microsoft article about Using Command Redirection Operators for an explanation of 2>nul and |. The redirection operators > and | must be escaped with caret character ^ on FOR command line to be interpreted as literal characters when Windows command interpreter processes this command line before executing command FOR which executes the embedded command line with using a separate command process started in background.
FOR with option /F captures output to handle STDOUT of started command process and processes this output line by line after started cmd.exe terminated itself. Empty lines are always ignored by FOR which do not occur here. Lines starting with a semicolon are also ignored by default because of eol=; is the default definition for end of line option. But a full qualified folder path cannot contain a semicolon at beginning because the folder path starts either with a drive letter or with a backslash in case of a UNC path. So default end of line option can be kept in this case. FOR would split up by default every line into substrings with using normal space and horizontal tab as string delimiters and would assign just first space/tab separated string to specified loop variable. This line splitting behavior is not wanted here as the folder path contains definitely a space character and the entire folder path is needed and not just the string up to first space. For that reason delims= is used to specify an empty list of delimiters which disables line splitting behavior.
FOR executes for every directory output by DIR passing FINDSTR filter with full path the command RD to remove the directory quietly because of option /Q and with all files and subdirectories because of /S.
The deletion of the directory could fail because of missing NTFS permissions, or the directory to delete or one of its subdirectories is current directory of a running process, or a file in the directory to delete is currently opened by a running process in a manner which denies deletion of the file while being opened, or the directory to delete does not exist anymore because it was deleted already before in FOR loop. The error message output by command RD to handle STDERR is in this case redirected to device NUL to suppress it.
Please note that command RD deletes all log and log-archives directories and not just the files and subdirectories in these directories. It is unclear from your question what exactly should be deleted by the batch file.
It is of course also possible to replace rd /Q /S "%%I" by del /A /F /Q "%%I\*" to delete just all files including hidden and read-only files quietly in the directory assigned with full path to loop variable I.
# left to command FOR and command RD just suppress the output of those commands before execution by Windows command processor cmd.exe. Both # are not needed if this single command line is used in a batch file containing before #echo off.
For understanding the used commands and how they work, open a command prompt window, execute there the following commands, and read entirely all help pages displayed for each command very carefully.
del /?
dir /?
findstr /?
for /?
rd /?
If you're wanting to remove the contents of the log and log-archive directories. This means the easiest solution would probably be FORFILES.
This will delete all the files under log and log-archive directories found within any subfolder of "C:\Program Files\product\plugins". The folders MUST be named exactly log or log-archive. It will not remove directories.
FORFILES /P "C:\Program Files\product\plugins" /M log /C "cmd /c if #isdir==TRUE DEL /s /q #path\*"
FORFILES /P "C:\Program Files\product\plugins" /M log-archive /C "cmd /c if #isdir==TRUE DEL /s /q #path\*"
You could also add a /D switch to only delete applicable files if they are older than a specific number of days. This will delete all the log and log-archive files under "C:\Program Files\product\plugins" that are older than 90 days:
FORFILES /D -90 /P "C:\Program Files\product\plugins" /M log /C "cmd /c if #isdir==TRUE DEL /s /q #path\*"
FORFILES /D -90 /P "C:\Program Files\product\plugins" /M log-archive /C "cmd /c if #isdir==TRUE DEL /s /q #path\*"

How to use a FOR loop to act on files which don't fulfil a condition?

I'm making a simple batch script to process a large set of files and delete all I don't want. I want about 10% of the files and they all have certain tags in their names, lets say they contain apple, orange or pear. As there are so many files I want deleted, it would be quite time consuming to construct a FOR loop such as:
#echo off
pause
for /R %%i in ([the list of names of the files I don't want]) do del %%i
pause
So I was wondering if it is possible to code it such that it deletes all files which don't have names containing apple, orange or pear?
In other words all files should be deleted not containing in its name one of those 3 words.
I'm using a FOR loop because the files are nested within lots of subdirectories and I would like to preserve this structure after the unwanted files have been deleted.
You can use this batch file containing (more or less) just one command line:
#echo off
for /F "delims=" %%I in ('dir * /A-D /B /S 2^>nul ^| %SystemRoot%\System32\findstr.exe /I /R /V /C:"apple[^\\]*$" /C:"orange[^\\]*$" /C:"pear[^\\]*$"') do ECHO del "%%I"
This batch code does not really delete files because of command ECHO before del at end of the command line. Run this batch file from within a command prompt window with current directory being the root of the directory tree on which to delete unwanted files and verify the output. Then remove ECHO and run the batch file once again.
The command DIR searches because of /S in current directory and all subdirectories only for files because of /A-D (not directory attribute) matching the wildcard pattern * with output in bare format because of /B which means the output contains just the names of all found files with full path.
DIR outputs an error message to handle STDERR if it can't find any file. This error message is suppressed by redirecting it to device NUL with 2>nul. The redirection operator > must be escaped here with caret character ^ to be first interpreted as literal character on parsing the FOR command line by Windows command interpreter.
The output of DIR to handle STDOUT is piped with | to standard console application FINDSTR which searches in all lines case-insensitive because of /I for the regular expression strings because of /R specified with /C:. The redirection operator | must be escaped here also with ^.
An OR expression is not supported by FINDSTR like it is by other applications with regular expression support. But it is possible to specify multiple search strings as done here which are all applied on each line of the text to process one after the other until a positive match occurs or there is no more search string. That is a classic OR.
The regular expression word[^\\]*$ means:
word ... There must be found word (case-insensitive).
[^\\]* ... Find 0 or more characters NOT being a backslash.
$ ... The matching string must be found at end of line.
The regular expression is used to get a positive match only for lines on which the file name contains either apple OR orange OR pear, but NOT the file path.
But there is one more FINDSTR option: /V. This option inverts the result output to handle STDOUT. So output are the lines on which none of the 3 regular expressions produce a positive match.
The command FOR processes each line output by FINDSTR used as negative filter for output of DIR and runs for each line the command DEL respectively ECHO without splitting the line up into space/tab separated strings because of delims=.
And that's it.
It is necessary to prevent the batch file from deletion if being stored in the directory tree processed by command DIR. This can be achieved most easily with setting read-only attribute on batch file as command DEL does not delete files with read-only attribute set.
Example:
#echo off
rem Prevent batch file from deletion by setting read-only attribute on batch file.
%SystemRoot%\System32\attrib.exe +r "%~f0"
for /F "delims=" %%I in ('dir * /A-D /B /S 2^>nul ^| %SystemRoot%\System32\findstr.exe /I /R /V /C:"apple[^\\]*$" /C:"orange[^\\]*$" /C:"pear[^\\]*$"') do del "%%I"
rem It is safe to remove read-only attribute from batch file.
%SystemRoot%\System32\attrib.exe -r "%~f0"
The batch code above has no ECHO before command del and therefore really deletes files on execution.
For understanding the used commands and how they work, open a command prompt window, execute there the following commands, and read entirely all help pages displayed for each command very carefully.
attrib /?
del /?
dir /?
echo /?
findstr /?
for /?
rem /?
Read also the Microsoft article about Using Command Redirection Operators for an explanation of | and 2>nul.

how to copy files from one directory to other in batch command

I wish to copy a file with extension .dyn which is located in each subfolder of main folder(T15_finished). I wish to copy it into respective subfolder at other location(T15). I have created that location using xcopy command. Here, .dyn file is being copied successfully in respective subfolder in T15 folder(see below code). Now, I have a file which has extension as .dynain which is located in the same subfolder as .dyn. And .dynain file is also getting copied which i don't want.
Please see following code which i have created. Can anyone tell me whats wrong ?
#echo off
xcopy D:\Master\SPRINGBACK\CPW\T15_finished D:\Master\SPRINGBACK\FRESH_SPRINGBACK\CPW\T15 /t
xcopy /e D:\Master\SPRINGBACK\CPW\T15_finished\*.dyn D:\Master\SPRINGBACK\FRESH_SPRINGBACK\CPW\T15
pause
Short file names. If you do a dir /x in the folder containing the .dynain file, you will see the 8.3 filename generated for the file, and it will have .dyn extension.
If you know the extensions of the conflicting files, you can use robocopy with /xf switch to indicate the files (*.dynain) to exclude, or you can generate a exclude file to use with xcopy /exclude:file (see xcopy /? for a explanation)
Or, you can generate the list of files to exclude
(for /f "tokens=" %%a in (
'dir /s /b "D:\Master\SPRINGBACK\CPW\T15_finished\*.dyn" ^| findstr /v /i /e /l ".dyn"'
) do #echo(%%~nxa)>excludedFiles.txt
xcopy /exclude:excludedFiles.txt /e D:\Master\SPRINGBACK\CPW\T15_finished\*.dyn D:\Master\SPRINGBACK\FRESH_SPRINGBACK\CPW\T15
Or (as posted by foxidrive), copy all and then delete the non needed files.
The short filename is being matched as well as the long filename. That is the reason.
A solution is to use another command to delete the files:
del /s "D:\Master\SPRINGBACK\FRESH_SPRINGBACK\CPW\T15\*.dynain"

How do I copy a directory that has a date stamp

I'm trying to copy the contents of a directory using a DOS batch file that begins with the computer name followed by an underscore and a date stamp. My first impulse was some variation of:
copy D:\%Computername%_\*\\*.* C:\WhateverPath
Of course I could not get this to work. Seems like a simple problem but I don't have much experience with batch files or DOS.
Try:
FOR /d %d IN (D:\%COMPUTERNAME%_*) DO xcopy %d C:\WhateverPath /E
This iterates over all directories (hence the /d) with the pattern %COMPUTERNAME%_* under D:\, and copies the contents of these directories into C:\WhateverPath. /Eis for copying all files and directories, also the empty ones.
For documentation of xcopy, type xcopy /? in a DOS shell (cmd).
Note: If you put this in a batch-file (something.bat), you must replace %d with %%d in the code above.
If you have multiple folders labeled C:\%computername%_%random_time_stamp%\ and you need to access each of them then move all of their contents to a single folder, you can do this:
Given the only underscore in the path is the one between %computername% and your timestamp
FOR /F "USEBACKQ tokens=*" %%F IN (`DIR /b /a:d "C:\" ^| FIND /I "%computername%_"`) DO (
COPY /y "%%~fF\*" "C:\WhateverPath\"
)
That states for every result that comes from the command DIR, /b switch meaning no header information, /a:d meaning only returning directories, I want to find only folders with the computername_ in it, and I want to copy the contents of each of those folders to C:\WhateverPath\ folder.

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