Selective DOS deleting

[spuppett]

I have 190 files in a directory. What I want to do is delete all of them but about 20, then refill the directory with updated versions of the files I deleted. Or more specifly I want to delete the files that don't get overwritten after a copy. I don't really want to write out 170 deletes.

All the filenames that I want to save all start the same way.

IE del .\* except m2*.dbf

Anyone have anythoughts or ideas or am I stuck.

[mmetzger]

You may have to do this in a couple steps and it depends on whether you can add some programs to help...

Using straight XP, you can do something like:


dir /b | findstr /r "^[^m][^2].*.[^d][^b][^f]"


It's not perfect, but should only list files not shown by your wildcard. You can then use scripting to delete it.

The other option is to simply write a quick piece of code in Perl, c#, etc that would take a directory and a true regex (or set of regex's) of what to delete.

[spuppett]

thanks for the reply. I'm always hesitent to use reg expressions, cause I'm not too comfortable with them. But I'll look into it and maybe some perl.

[PeejAvery]

A way around your problem...

md temp
move *.* temp
cd temp
move print*.* ..
cd..
del /q temp
rd temp

[spuppett]

brillant.

[PeejAvery]

brillant.
Thanks. I miss DOS.