FORFILES, for your fancier batch file enumeration needs

re: FORFILES, for your fancier batch file enumeration needs

Luca — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 01:24:46 GMT

@Adam Rosenfield

foghting with this in the last few days

forfiles /d -30 /c "cmd /c set test=1"

may you help me with this please?

re: FORFILES, for your fancier batch file enumeration needs

Cthu — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 09:02:55 GMT

"Who the heck wants to operate on files modified in the future? Except perhaps the Microsoft Research folks who are working on that time machine."

Cue a flood of people taking that statement seriously and bothering Microsoft support for information about the secret time machine project...

re: FORFILES, for your fancier batch file enumeration needs

Crescens2k — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 17:42:48 GMT

@Legolas

This is why I often browse through System32 on a new version of Windows to see the additions/changes. I knew about these and a few more because they are in the System32 directory.

re: FORFILES, for your fancier batch file enumeration needs

Legolas — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 14:51:32 GMT

Thanks for this series! I only read the last one and I learned something already. It's a real pity this command isn't more obviously available. Any idea where I could've learned about it without knowing it exists? I've looked at the output of 'help' in the command line, but it isn't there. Is there something like help advanced or so, with all the advanced stuff in it?

[It's not listed in HELP because the command was added later, and the people who added it didn't ask the CMD folks "Hey, could you add this to HELP?" There are lots of commands not included in the HELP list, like WHERE and PowerShell. -Raymond]

re: FORFILES, for your fancier batch file enumeration needs

Mark — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 22:43:16 GMT

Raymond, do you secretly like batch files? (Of course, if it's a secret, you won't admit it, making this a silly question, but I had to ask.)

re: FORFILES, for your fancier batch file enumeration needs

Neil — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 10:26:44 GMT

FOR (and FOR /R) won't work with hidden files, and I couldn't work out how to get FOR ... ('DIR/S/A') to work with Unicode file names (yes I tried CMD /U), so FORFILES turned out to be really useful in that case.

For completeness, as someone pointed out in a previous post's comment, tokens=* doesn't work, you need to use delims= to properly handle file names including spaces.

re: FORFILES, for your fancier batch file enumeration needs

Karellen — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 08:58:07 GMT

Hey, when I posted that comment, the last comment was Ben L's. What gives?

re: FORFILES, for your fancier batch file enumeration needs

Karellen — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 08:56:20 GMT

Does anyone know how old "forfiles" is? On the MSDN pages I can't find any mention of the earliest verison of Windows (or DOS?) that it was shipped with. It says "Applies To: Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista", but it says the same thing about "cd", which definitely shipped with earlier versions than that! :-)

re: FORFILES, for your fancier batch file enumeration needs

anonymous — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 22:39:36 GMT

It does not show up in the list of commands whey you type "HELP".

In MSDN it is documented as Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

so probably won't work for @xpclient

re: FORFILES, for your fancier batch file enumeration needs

Andrew from Vancouver — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 20:55:47 GMT

This is a great series Raymond, I hope you see fit to continue it! I'm a Windows batch file veteran and I still learned a thing or two.

By the way, the forfiles.exe is included in Vista/7/2K8 but for W2K3 and earlier it was in the Resource Kit. The W2K3 version runs fine on WXP. But you need the W2K version on W2K.