How to loop through files matching wildcard in batch file

Question

I have a set of base filenames  for each name  f  there are exactly two files   f in  and  f out    I want to write a batch file  in Windows XP  which goes through all the filenames  for each one it should    Display the base name  f  Perform an action on  f in  Perform another action on  f out    I don t have any way to list the set of base filenames  other than to search for   in  or   out  for example

User · Answer

Expanding on Nathans post  The following will do the job lot in one batch file    echo off  if  1   Sub  goto  2  for   f in    in  do call  0 Sub action    nf goto end   action echo The file is  3 copy  3 in  3 out ren  3 out monkeys are cool txt   end

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Assuming you have two programs that process the two files  process in exe and process out exe   for   f in    in  do       echo    nf     process in     nf in      process out     nf out         nf is a substitution modifier  that expands  f to a file name only  See other modifiers in https   technet microsoft com en-us library bb490909 aspx  midway down the page  or just in the next answer

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Easiest way  as I see it  is to use a for loop that calls a second batch file for processing  passing that second file the base name   According to the for    help  basename can be extracted using the nifty  n option  So  the base script would read   for   f in    in  do call process cmd    nf   Then  in process cmd  assume that  0 contains the base name and act accordingly  For example   echo The file is  0 copy  0 in  0 out ren  0 out monkeys are cool txt   There might be a better  way to do this in one script  but I ve always been a bit hazy on how to pull of multiple commands in a single for loop in a batch file   EDIT  That s fantastic  I had somehow missed the page in the docs that showed that you could do multi-line blocks in a FOR loop  I am going to go have to go back and rewrite some batch files now

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Echoing f in and f out will seperate the concept of what to loop and what not to loop when used in a for  f loop     Get the files seperated echo f in gt files to pass through txt echo f out gt  gt files to pass through txt  for  F   a in  files to pass through txt  do   for  R   b in       do   if    a  NEQ    b    echo   b gt  gt dont pass through these txt         I m assuming the base name is the whole string  f     If I m right then all the files begin with  f     So all you have to do is display  f   right    But that would be too easy    Let s do this the right way  for  f   C in  dont pass through these txt    displays the filename and not the extention echo   nC     Although you didn t ask  a good way to pass commands into f in and f out would be to     for  F   D  tokens    in  dont pass through these txt  do   for  F   E in    D  do   start  wait   E       A link to all the Windows XP commands link  I apologize if I did not answer this correctly  The question was very hard for me to read

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You can use this line to print the contents of your desktop   FOR   I in  C  windows desktop      DO echo   I    Once you have the   I variable it s easy to perform a command on it  just replace the word echo with your program   In addition  substitution of FOR variable references has been enhanced You can now use the following optional syntax     I         - expands  I removing any surrounding quotes       fI        - expands  I to a fully qualified path name   dI        - expands  I to a drive letter only   pI        - expands  I to a path only  directory with      nI        - expands  I to a file name only   xI        - expands  I to a file extension only   sI        - expanded path contains short names only   aI        - expands  I to file attributes of file   tI        - expands  I to date time of file   zI        - expands  I to size of file    PATH I   - searches the directories listed in the PATH                environment variable and expands  I to the                fully qualified name of the first one found                 If the environment variable name is not                defined or the file is not found by the                search  then this modifier expands to the                empty string   https   ss64 com nt syntax-args html  In the above examples  I and PATH can be replaced by other valid values   The    syntax is terminated by a valid FOR variable name  Picking upper case variable names like  I makes it more readable and avoids confusion with the modifiers  which are not case sensitive   You can get the full documentation by typing FOR

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There is a tool usually used in MS Servers  as far as I can remember  called forfiles   The link above contains help as well as a link to the microsoft download page

User · Answer

The code below filters filenames starting with given substring  It could be changed to fit different needs by working on subfname substring extraction and IF statement   echo off rem filter all files not starting with the prefix  dat  setlocal enabledelayedexpansion FOR  R your-folder-fullpath   F IN       DO   set fname    nF set subfname  fname  0 3  IF NOT   subfname       dat  echo    F    pause

[command-line] How to loop through files matching wildcard in batch file

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