Windows – Recursively delete directory except for some files in Windows

shellwindows

In Windows, I need to recursively delete a directory except for a short list of files to be kept. The files may be nested in subdirectories.

I tried making the files read-only before running "rmdir /s", but it doesn't work. Read-only files cannot be deleted directly, but they are deleted when inside a subdirectory being deleted with "rmdir /s".

Any other ideas?

Best Answer

As far as I know you really can't have it both ways -- either the delete is recursive (everything goes) or it is not recursive (you explicitly list what you want gone).

The only reason the kind of read-only trick you tried works on Unix systems is because the failure/error propagates up the tree (you can't delete something that still has children), and it would appear from your test that Windows is less particular about that.

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Windows – Need to exclude a specific result from a Batch For Loop

Here's a script to dump a list of the absolute paths of all EXE files under "%ProgramFiles%" except those that are in the "Windows NT" subdirectory. I would think you could probably beat this into submission for what you're looking for.

@echo off

for /f "usebackq delims=" %%i in (`dir "%ProgramFiles%\*.exe" /s /a /b`) do call :checkit "%%i" 
goto end

:checkit
echo %1 | find /i "%ProgramFiles%\Windows NT\" >NUL 2>NUL
if errorlevel 1 echo %~1

:end

Linux – Removing old cache files – command help

The issue is that adding -exec ... to the end of all those -o flags is tripping up precedence of AND vs OR, eg it's finding everything that is *.css.gzip OR *.javascript.gzip OR *.javascript OR (*.css AND delete it) so it only removes *.css but finds all the other files but does nothing with them. Incidentally it also means that your type and mtime flags are only applying to *.javascript.gzip.

Use

find /home/*/tmp/cache/* -mtime +2 -type f \( -name '*.css.gzip' -o -name '*.javascript.gzip' -o -name '*.javascript' -o -name '*.css' \) -exec rm {} \;

in order to force it to find all files with mtime +2 AND type f AND (all the different filename options) AND delete them.

To see this in action, replace -exec ... with -print in both your version and my version with ().

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows – Need to exclude a specific result from a Batch For Loop

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