Archive for category Command Line

Command line Batch File to Remove Direcories, using a Wild Card!

Posted by shawson in Batch Scripting, Command Line on October 28, 2009

We have a bunch of web services which log details of requests that come in, in folders named using the current date- in the format YYYY-MM-DDD-HH-MM-SS. I wanted to produce a simple cleanup batch file which we could run every month to bin all logs for transactions which happened 3 months ago- using the dos commands which exist on Windows Server 2003.

The dos “del” command allows you to delete using wild cards – so for example “dev 2009-07-*” would erase any files starting with “2009-07-”; However this doesn’t work with folders- so it fell to the rd (remove directory) command- but this doesn’t support wild cards (I’m assuming for safety- to stop you permanently erasing 100′s of folders and their contents accidently- remember there’s no recycle bin when you delete from the command line!).

To get around this I created a simple Batch file which accepted a wildcard as a parameter, then removes all those folders at the current level (it wont check recursivly). Just in case this is of use to anyone else, here’s the code;

REM - performs a remove directory, with wildcard matching - example ; rd-wildcard 2007-*
dir %1 /b >loglist.txt
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
for /f %%a in (./loglist.txt) do (
	rd /s /q %%a
)
del /q loglist.txt
endlocal

4 Comments