This question already has an answer here:
At which point does `for` or `for /R` enumerate the directory (tree)?
(1 answer)
Closed 3 years ago.
I can add a prefix to a series of text files using:
:: rename files
for %%a in (*.txt) do (
ren "%%a" "Seekret file %%a"
:: ECHO %%a Seekret file %%a
)
which will turn
a.txt
b.txt
c.txt
into
Seekret file a.txt
Seekret file b.txt
Seekret file c.txt
However, the above code seems to rename the first file twice with the prefix. I end up with
Seekret file Seekret file a.txt
and I have no idea why. Any ideas?
Use
for /f "delims=" %%a in ('dir /b /a-d *.txt') do (
What is happening is that the version you are using sees the renamed-file as a new file. The dir version builds a list of the filenames and then executes the for on each line, so the list is already built and static and cmd isn't trying to operate on a moving target.
Also - use rem, not :: within a code-block (parenthesised sequence of instructions) as this form of comment is in fact a broken label and labels are not allowed in a code block.
Yes, this can happen, especially on FAT32 and exFAT drives because of these file systems do not return the list of directory entries matched by a wildcard pattern to calling executable in an alphabetic order. for processes the directory entries matching *.txt one after the other and the command ren results in changing the directory entries, i.e. the file names list is modified while iterating over it.
The solution is using:
for /F "eol=| delims=" %%I in ('dir *.txt /A-D /B 2^>nul') do ren "%%I" "Seekret file %%I"
FOR runs in this case in background %ComSpec% /c with the command line specified between ' which means with Windows installed into directory C:\Windows:
C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C dir *.txt /A-D /B 2>nul
So one more command process is started in background which executes DIR which
searches in current directory
just for files because of option /A-D (attribute not directory)
including files with hidden attribute set (use /A-D-H to exclude hidden files)
matching the wildcard pattern *.txt
and outputs in bare format just the file names because of option /B.
An error message output by DIR to handle STDERR in case of not finding any directory entry matching these criteria is suppressed by redirecting it to device NUL.
Read the Microsoft article about Using Command Redirection Operators for an explanation of 2>nul. The redirection operator > must be escaped with caret character ^ on FOR command line to be interpreted as literal character when Windows command interpreter processes this command line before executing command FOR which executes the embedded dir command line with using a separate command process started in background.
The file names without path are output by DIR to handle STDOUT of background command process. This output is captured by FOR respectively the command process executing the batch file.
After started command process terminated itself, FOR processes the captured list of file names. All changes done on directory during the loop iterations do not matter anymore for that reason. The file names list does not change anymore.
The options eol=| delims= are needed to get the complete file names assigned one after the other to loop variable I even on starting with ; or containing a space character. eol=| redefines default end of line character ; to a vertical bar which no file name can contain. delims= defines an empty list of delimiters to disable default line splitting behavior on normal spaces and horizontal tabs.
Note: :: is an invalid label and not a comment. Labels inside a command block are not allowed and usually result in undefined behavior on execution of the command block. Use command REM (remark) for a comment.
Even better would be:
for /F "eol=| delims=" %%I in ('dir *.txt /A-D /B 2^>nul ^| %SystemRoot%\System32\findstr.exe /B /I /L /V /C:"Seekret file "') do ren "%%I" "Seekret file %%I"
FINDSTR is used here to output from list of file names output by DIR and redirected to STDIN of FINDSTR all file names which
do not because of /V (inverted result)
begin because of option /B
case-insensitive because of option /I
with the literally interpreted because of option /L (redundant to /C:)
string Seekret file .
Option /C: is needed to specify the search string containing two spaces as using just "Seekret file" would result in searching literally and case-insensitive for either Seekret OR file at begin of a line. In a search string specified with just "..." each space is interpreted by FINDSTR as an OR expression like | in a Perl regular expression string.
A search string specified with /C: is interpreted implicitly as literal string, but with using /R (instead of /L) it would be possible to get this string interpreted as regular expression string on which a space is interpreted as space and not as OR expression. It is possible to specify multiple search strings using multiple times /C:.
My recommendation on using FINDSTR: Use always either /L or /R to make it clear for FINDSTR and for every reader of the command line how FINDSTR should interpret the search string(s) specified with "..." or with /C:"...".
I guess I'll throw my hat in too, since I'm not really a fan of looping through dir output and no one else is currently accounting for this script already having been run:
#echo off
set "dir=C:\Your\Root\Directory"
set "pfx=Seekret file "
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
for /r "%dir%" %%A in (*.txt) do (
set "txt=%%~nA"
if not "!txt:~0,13!"=="%pfx%" ren "%%A" "%pfx%%%~nxA"
)
pause
for /r will loop recursively through all .txt files, set each one as parameter %%A (per iteration), set a variable txt as parameter %%A reduced to just its name (%%~nA), and then it compares the first 13 characters of the text file to your example prefix (which is 13 characters long when you include the space: Seekret file) - if they match the loop does nothing; if they do not match, the loop will rename %%A to include the prefix at the beginning. If you don't want it to be recursive, you can use for %%A in ("%dir%"\*.txt) do ( instead. Other than that, you'll just change !txt:~0,13! depending on what your prefix is or how many letters into a filename you want to check. You also don't have to set your directory and prefix variables, I just prefer to do so because it makes the block look cleaner - and it's easier to go back and change one value as opposed to every place that value occurs in a script.
Reference: for /r, ren, variable substrings
Related
I am looking to automatically clean directories that contain original photos and smaller resolutions of a single photo.
I have the following structure for file names
original_image.jpg
original_image-1024x768.jpg
original_image-800x600.jpg
original_image-640x480.jpg
Is there a way, using a windows script (cmd, not PowerShell) to look through files in a directory, and delete any files that has the same name followed by a dash, a group of digits, and x, another group of digits, then the samme extension as the original file?
OOh - not that easy! Be careful!
#ECHO OFF
SETLOCAL enabledelayedexpansion
rem The following setting for the source directory is a name
rem that I use for testing and deliberately include names which include spaces to make sure
rem that the process works using such names. These will need to be changed to suit your situation.
SET "sourcedir=u:\your files"
FOR /f "delims=" %%b IN (
'dir /b /a-d "%sourcedir%\*" ^|findstr /i /v /r ".*-[0-9]*x[0-9]*.*" '
) DO (
SET "filter=%%~nb-[0-9]*x[0-9]*\%%~xb"
SET "filter=!filter: =\ !"
FOR /f "delims=" %%e IN (
'dir /b /a-d "%sourcedir%\%%~nb*%%~xb" ^|findstr /i /r "!filter!" '
) DO ECHO DEL "%%e"
)
GOTO :EOF
Always verify against a test directory before applying to real data.
The required DEL commands are merely ECHOed for testing purposes. After you've verified that the commands are correct, change ECHO DEL to DEL to actually delete the files.
The outer loop (%%b) processes a 'dir' list of the directory /a-d without directorynames and /b in basic form (names only - no headers. footers or details.)
The list is passed to a findstr command to filter the filename pattern required. The pipe | must be escaped by a caret^ to tell cmd that the pipe belongs to the single-quoted command to be executed, not to the for.
The findstr filter is /i case-insensitive /r using a regular expression. The /v option outputs those lines that do not match the filter. The regular expression is .* any number of any character, - -literal dash [0-9]* any number of numeric characters x literal "x" [0-9]* any numerics again and .* any characters.
The delims= causes the filenames to be delivered literally to %%b by setting no delimiters and hence just one token. See for /? from the prompt or endless examples on SO for documentation.
Next step is to set up the filter for the next findstr. This is %%~nb the name part of the filename in %%b and %%~xb the extension part (including the dot). The \ escapes the dot contributed by %%~xb, making it a literal dot instead of a single-character-match.
The next step replaces each "space" with "<kbd>space" See set /? from the prompt or endless examples on SO for documentation.
Finally, execute another dir but this time, look for files matching the pattern of the filename and the extension of %%b, separated by anything and filtering using the string established in filter.
delayedexpansion is required since filter is being changed within a code block (parenthesised sequence of lines) - so !var! retrieves the current value of the variable where %var% is the original vale (when the block was encountered).
Why the extra complexity?
Suppose the file list includes
original_image.jpg
original_image-1024x768.jpg
original_image-800x600.jpg
"original image.jpg"
"original image-1024x768.jpg"
"original image-800x600.jpg"
Then because a Space in a findstr causes an or of the strings before and after the space, so whereas the %%e dir selects on those files matching "original image*.jpg", this includes "original image.jpg". The regex constructed would be "original image-[0-9]*x[0-9]*\.jpg" which matches "original" and therefore "original image.jpg" will be selected for deletion.
I want to list all the files and directories inside a directory using a for loop in a batch script. How can I do it?
I used below but it didn't work :
for /r %%I in (".") do ( ls -ltr '%%I') ## Listing only filenames and not directories name
Any help is appreciable.
Thanks!
If you just want a list of dirs and files, recursively, what about:
dir /b/s "."
If you want to do something special with each of the stream item, using a for loop, you could do something like:
for /f "tokens=* delims=" %%i in ('dir /b/s "."') do ( echo "%%i" )
There I used echo for echoing, but you can put whatever you need.
"to list all the files and directories inside a directory using a for loop in a batch script." you should use the DIR command.
If you open a Command Prompt window, type dir /? and press the ENTER key you should see its usage information.
One important thing to note is the /A option. What is not mentioned specifically is that using it alone, (without additional parameters D, R, H, A, S, I, L or O), enables all attributes.
Therefore to list all items in the current directory recursively in bare format you'd use:
DIR /A /B /S
or
DIR . /A /B /S
If you wanted to list them in a specific location relative to the current directory, you'd use:
DIR "Location" /A /B /S
or:
DIR ".\Location" /A /B /S
And For a specific absolute path:
DIR "L:\ocation" /A /B /S
And if you wanted it to be in the same location as the batch file itself, you can use the special variable for the current script %0:
DIR "%~dp0." /A /B /S
To perform that command within a For loop, you should first open a Command Prompt window, type for /? and press the ENTER key, to read its usage information.
You should note that you are running a command, and should therefore use a FOR /F loop, i.e.
FOR /F ["options"] %variable IN ('command') DO command [command-parameters]
But should also note that:
To use the FOR command in a batch program, specify %%variable instead of %variable.
So:
FOR /F ["options"] %%variable IN ('command') DO command [command-parameters]
As you have your command already, the options now become important. The first you need to understand is eol which whilst it seems to mean End Of Line, is specific to only one end, the beginning! What this does it does not pass any result of 'command' to the DO if it begins with a single specific character. The defualt for eol is the semicolon ;, (probably because historically it was a common line comment marker in many files). Generally, a file or directory name could include, and begin with a semicolon, so in order to include all files, you would specify a character which cannot be included in a filename, for me the simplest is ?, although I've seen many examples using |. However, when you perform a recursive DIR command, every returned line is a fully qualified path, none of which can begin with a semicolon, so you can for this task ignore eol. You clearly want everything returned, so do not require skip any lines returned. tokens and delimiters, are adjusted according to what you want to do with the results, in this case, you want the entire content of each line returned by your 'command' with no splitting on specific characters. You should note that tokens by default is 1 and delims by default is both the space and a horizontal tab characters. You should stipulate therefore that you do not want any delimiters, so that the first token is everything returned on each line of 'command'. You rarely require the usebackq option, so for the purposes of this answer, and your task, just ignore it.
Now put it all together:
FOR /F "delims=" %%G IN ('DIR "Location" /A /B /S') DO command
Finally you can use your wanted DO command with each result from your parenthesized DIR command. That result will be held within your variable %%G.
For the purposes of just viewing each result, we'll use the ECHO command, (you would just replace that with your chosen command). Please note that as each result of the DIR command is a file or directory name string, you should generally doublequote it.
allObjects.cmd
FOR /F "delims=" %%G IN ('DIR "Location" /A /B /S') DO ECHO "%%G"
Please remember to replace "Location" as needed, before running the Windows Command Script
Create two loops, one for files
for /r %%i in (*.*) do <something>
and one for directories
for /r %%i in (.) do <something>
and use the same command after do
But, since you have Cygwin installed anyway, why not use that power and do
find . | xargs -L1 ls -ltr
where find . finds all files and directories, | xargs passes the output to xargs which -L1 splits the output after each line and passes each line to ls -ltr.
I'm fairly new to batch, my problem is the following:
I have a long list of folders and need to delete the first 3 characters from each of their names. Think 01_Folder1, 02_Folder2, 03_Folder3 and so on. I've tried patching together pieces of CMD commands I've found on the web but could not come up with a script that does what I want it to do. I've even tried using VBScript as I'm more familiar with VB in general but failed to find a solution as well.
Is there an easy way to solve this?
Edit:
Here's my attempt; it's giving me a syntax error but as I am not versed enough in CMD, I cannot really see why:
setlocal enableextensions enabledelayedexpansion
for /d %%i in ("%~dp0*") do (set name=%%i && ren "!name!" "!name:~3!")
endlocal
The FOR command line does not work because of assigned to loop variable i is the name of a directory with full path and so removing the first three characters results in removing drive letter, colon and backslash from path of the directory and not the first three characters from directory name. Further the full qualified directory name is assigned with an additional space to environment variable name because of the space between %%i and operator &&.
One solution would be:
#echo off
setlocal EnableExtensions EnableDelayedExpansion
for /d %%i in ("%~dp0*") do set "name=%%~nxi" && ren "%%i" "!name:~3!"
endlocal
The disadvantage of this solution is that directory names with one or more exclamation marks in name or path are not processed correct because of enabled delayed expansion resulting in interpreting ! in full directory name as begin/end of a delayed expanded environment variable reference.
Another solution is quite simple with using just the command line:
#for /D %%i in ("%~dp0*_*") do for /F "tokens=1* delims=_" %%j in ("%%~nxi") do #ren "%%i" "%%k"
The outer FOR searches in directory of the batch file for non-hidden subdirectories matching the pattern *_*.
For each directory name assigned with full path to loop variable i one more FOR command is used which processes just the string after last backlash (directory name without path) and splits the string up into substrings (tokens).
The string delimiter is an underscore as defined with option delims=_. The option tokens=1* tells FOR to assign first underscore delimited string to specified loop variable j and everything after one or more underscores after first underscore delimited string to next but one loop variable k according to ASCII table.
The inner FOR would ignore a directory name on which first substring starts with a semicolon as being the default end of line character. But in this case no directory has ; at beginning of its name.
There is one problem remaining with this command line. It does not work on drives with FAT32 or exFAT as file system, just by chance on drives with NTFS file system. The reason is that the list of non-hidden directories changes in file system while the outer FOR iterates over the directory entries matching the pattern.
A better solution loads first the list of directories to rename into memory of Windows command process which is processing the batch file before starting with renaming the directories.
#for /F "delims=" %%i in ('dir "%~dp0*_*" /AD-H /B 2^>nul') do for /F "tokens=1* delims=_" %%j in ("%%i") do #ren "%~dp0%%i" "%%k"
FOR executes in this case in background one more command process with %ComSpec% /c and the command line within ' appended as additional arguments. So executed in background is with Windows installed to C:\Windows:
C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c dir "C:\Batch\File\Path\*_*" /AD-H /B 2>nul
DIR searches in directory of the batch file for
non-hidden directories because of option /AD-H (attribute directory and not hidden)
matching the wildcard pattern *_*
and outputs just the directory names in bare format because of option /B without path to handle STDOUT (standard output) of background command process.
Read the Microsoft documentation about Using command redirection operators for an explanation of 2>nul. The redirection operator > must be escaped with caret character ^ on FOR command line to be interpreted as literal character when Windows command interpreter processes this command line before executing command FOR which executes the embedded dir command line with using a separate command process started in background.
FOR respectively the Windows command process processing the batch file captures everything written to standard output handle of background command process and starts processing it as described above after started cmd.exe terminated itself. So there is in memory already a list of directory names and so the executed REN command does not result anymore in a changed list of directory names on processing one after the other.
Please note that a directory with name 01__Underscore_at_beginning is renamed to Underscore_at_beginning and not to _Underscore_at_beginning by both single line solutions.
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.
echo /?
endlocal /?
for /?
ren /?
set /?
setlocal /?
I want to create a batch file able to apply some processing on each JPG file in a folder hierarchy. The following script file works very well for that case (here I only echo the name of each file, but this should be replaced by some more complex statements in the real application):
:VERSION 1
#echo off
set "basefolder=C:\Base"
for /r %basefolder% %%f in (*.jpg) do echo %%f
Actually, I don't want to explore all the folder hierarchy under %basefolder%, but only a given list of subfolders. This modified script is able to deal with that case :
:VERSION 2
#echo off
set "basefolder=C:\Base"
set "subfolders=A B C"
for %%s in (%subfolders%) do (
pushd %basefolder%\%%~s"
for /r %%f in (*.jpg) do echo %%f
popd
)
Is there a solution to remove the pushd/popd pair of statements, to get something closer to the initial script. I thought that one of the following scripts would do the job:
:VERSION 3
#echo off
set "basefolder=C:\Base"
set "subfolders=A B C"
for %%s in (%subfolders%) do (
for /r %basefolder%\%%~s" %%f in (*.jpg) do echo %%f
)
or, using delayed expansion:
:VERSION 4
#echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
set "basefolder=C:\Base"
set "subfolders=A B C"
for %%s in (%subfolders%) do (
set "folder=%basefolder%\%%~s"
echo !folder!
for /r !folder! %%f in (*.jpg) do echo %%f
)
but none of them is working. When running the second one, the echo !folder! command in the external loop shows C:\Base\A, C:\Base\B and C:\Base\C as expected, but the inner loop doesn't echo any JPG file, so I guess that the recursive for /r command does not run correctly.
What am I doing wrong ?
Final edit after answers :
Thanks to #aschipfl who provided a link to the answer posted by #jeb on another question, quoted below:
The options of FOR, IF and REM are only parsed up to the special character phase. Or better the commands are detected in the special character phase and a different parser is activated then. Therefore it's neither possible to use delayed expansion nor FOR meta-variables in these options.
In other words, my versions 3 and 4 do not work because when defining the root folder of the FOR /R command, neither the %%~s nor the !folder! are correctly expanded by the expression parser. There is no way to change that, as this is a parser limitation. As I said in a comment below: the root folder option in the FOR /R command is basically only syntactic sugar to avoid the use of pushd/popd before and after the command. As this syntactic sugar is incomplete, we have to stick to the original syntax for some specific use cases, as the one presented here. The alternatives proposed by #Gerhard (using a subroutine CALL) or by #Mofi (parsing the result of a DIR command) are working, but they are neither more readable nor more efficient than the simple pushd/popd version I proposed initially.
My Approach for this would be really straight forward:
#echo off
set "basedir=C:\Base"
set "subfolders="A","B","C""
for %%i in (%subfolders%) do for /R "%basedir%" %%a in ("%%~i\*.jpg") do echo %%~fa
The double quotes inside of the subfolders variable is important here, it will ensure that folder names with whitespace are not seen as separators for the folder names. For instance:
set "subfolders="Folder A","Folder B","Folder C""
Edit
#echo off
set "basedir=C:\Base"
set "subfolders="A","B","C""
for %%i in (%subfolders%) do call :work "%%~i"
goto :eof
:work
for /R "%basedir%\%~1" %%a in (*.jpg) do echo %%~fa
It is in general not advisable to assign the value of a loop variable to an environment variable and next use the environment variable unmodified without or with concatenation with other strings being coded in batch file or defined already above the FOR loop within body of a FOR loop. That causes just problems as it requires the usage of delayed expansion which results in files and folders with one or more ! are not correct processed anymore inside body of the FOR loop caused by double parsing of the command line before execution, or command call is used on some command lines, or a subroutine is used called with call which makes the processing of the batch file much slower.
I recommend to use this batch file for the task:
#echo off
setlocal EnableExtensions DisableDelayedExpansion
set "basefolder=C:\Base"
set "subfolders=A B C "Subfolder D" SubfolderE"
for %%I in (%subfolders%) do for /F "delims=" %%J in ('dir "%basefolder%\%%~I\*.jpg" /A-D /B /S 2^>nul') do echo %%J
endlocal
The inner FOR loop starts for each subfolder defined in subfolders in background one more command process with %ComSpec% /c and the DIR command line appended as additional arguments. So executed is with Windows installed to C:\Windows for example for the first subfolder:
C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c dir "C:\Base\A\*.jpg" /A-D /B /S 2>nul
The command DIR searches
in specified directory C:\Base\A and all it subdirectories because of option /S
for files because of option /A-D (attribute not directory) including those with hidden attribute set
matching the pattern *.jpg in long or short file name
and outputs to handle STDOUT of background command process just the matching file names because of option /B (bare format)
with full path because of option /S.
The error message output by DIR on nothing found matching these criteria is redirecting from handle STDERR to device NUL to suppress it.
Read the Microsoft documentation about Using command redirection operators for an explanation of 2>nul. The redirection operator > must be escaped with caret character ^ on FOR command line to be interpreted as literal character when Windows command interpreter processes this command line before executing command FOR which executes the embedded dir command line with using a separate command process started in background.
The output to handle STDOUT of background command process is captured by FOR respectively the command process which is processing the batch file. FOR processes the captured output line by line after started cmd.exe terminated itself. This is very often very important. The list of files to process is already in memory of command process before processing the first file name. This is not the case on using for /R as this results in accessing file system, getting first file name of a non-hidden file matching the wildcard pattern, run all commands in body of FOR and accessing the file system once again to get next file name. The for /R approach is problematic if the commands in body of FOR change a file to process like deleting, moving, modifying, copying it in same folder, or renaming a found file because of the entries in file system changes while for /R is iterating over these entries. That can easily result in some files are skipped or some files are processed more than once and it could result also an endless running loop, especially on FAT file system like FAT32 or exFAT. It is never good to iterate over a list of files on which the list changes on each iteration.
Command FOR on usage of /F ignores empty lines which do not occur here. A non-empty line is split up into substrings using a normal space and a horizontal tab as string delimiters by default. This line splitting behavior is not wanted here as there could be full qualified file names containing anywhere inside full name one or more spaces. For that reason delims= is used to define an empty list of delimiters which disables the line splitting behavior.
FOR with option /F would also ignore lines on which first substring starts with ; which is the default end of line character. This is no problem here because of command DIR was used with option /S and so each file name is output with full path which makes it impossible that any file name starts with ;. So the default eol=; can be kept.
FOR with option /F assigns by default just first substring to specified loop variable as tokens=1 is the default. This default can be kept here as splitting the lines (full file names) into substrings is disabled already with delims= and so there is always the full file name assigned to the loop variable.
This example uses just echo %%I to output the file names with full path. But it is now safe to replace this single command by a command block which does more with the JPEG files because of the list of JPEG files for each specified subfolder tree in base folder is always already completely in memory of command process processing the batch file.
I have almost 2000 files which I need to rename.
The files are named in the following format: PART1#PART2#PART3.pdf
I would like to batch rename the files so that PART2 is moved before PART1 e.g. PART2#PART1#PART3.pdf
PART 1 = A random document reference e.g. 124244
PART 2 = A reference number e.g. 12-12434-A
PART 3 = A short description e.g. Part 1
The # symbol separates each of these parts.
Is there a simple utility which I can use to make this change?
Use a batch file
#echo off
setlocal enableextensions disabledelayedexpansion
cd /d "c:\where\thefiles\are"
for /f "tokens=1,2,* delims=#" %%a in ('
dir /b /a-d *.pdf ^| findstr /r /b /e /i /c:"[^#][^#-]*#[^#][^#]*#..*\.pdf"
') do echo ren "%%a#%%b#%%c" "%%b#%%a#%%c"
What this code does is
Get the file list: a dir command asking for .pdf files in a bare format without the folders
Filters to only get the adecuated files: findstr command, searching for a regular expression that matches the beginning and end of the lines, ignoring case. The expression that is tested against the file names is : a non # character, followed by a sequence of non # or - characters (to avoid renaming the files twice), followed by a #, followed by a non # and a sequence of non # characters, followed by a # and any sequence of characters ending in .pdf
The for command splits the names using the # as token delimiter and for each one do the rename.
Rename operations are only echoed to console. If the output is correct, remove the echo command