Hi there,

I'm trying to find all .txt files on my C: Drive that have exactly 7 characters, then display them in a wide format.
The code I'm using at the moment is


But it's returning other files e.g.


Any help would be much appreciated.

I think this command should do that:
However, if previous command fails, then this code should correctly works:

So there's no way to just slightly modify my code? It just seems so close to working.
I was trying to do this without using any loops, but if there isn't any other way, then your way will have to do.

Can you describe the purpose?

How do you want to display the folder names in such a listing?

Hi foxidrive

Yes, I just want to display them in a wide format, and then append them on to the end of a text file I created earlier.
This is exam revision, so I'm guessing I'll have to know how to do this. I'm very close, I just don't see why those other files are showing up on the right.

Thanks

Wide format creates strings of filenames. Your regexp is matching the leading part of the string.

This should only give you the ones in the first column, but you will lose any ones that don't start in column 1.

DIR C:\ /W /S | findstr /R "^.......\.txt$"

The code you supplied works to some degree, but has left out quite a few of the files it displayed previously.



Those are the only ones that showed up.

Thank you for taking the time to help me, I've spent ages trying to do this, and this is a step in the right direction.

Can you use SED?

Like the previous one, any matches that occur after column 12 will be deleted, but it will give you those in column 1.

DIR /W /S | SED -n "s/\(^.......\.txt\)/\1/ip"


This next one is far more robust and should report all the files, but it does not provide a wide format listing.

Mate, careful. This code won't find .txt at [position] !name:~7,4! unless you set name to %%~NXf.

This works here in an 80 column console. It cheats a bit because the lines aren't individual lines - they just wrap in this manner to provide a wide listing.

If any files contain a ^ or % or & then it will probably break.

That code lists all base file names width 7 or smaller

EDIT - I missed the /S option in the original request, so I need to modify the code below

Here a pure batch solution using nothing but native commands.

Since DIR cannot limit its output to files with base name of exactly 7 characters, you cannot use DIR to produce the wide format. You will need to use some type of loop to create the wide format.

You can use any number of techniques to check each file (one per line) to see if it matches your requirements.

I would use

Then you need to use a loop to get the results in your wide format.

You need to decide how wide the line is, and how many spaces between each file. I'm going to assume a width of 80 with 5 spaces between columns, so that allows 5 columns.

It would be nice to avoid using delayed expansion so that you don't have to worry about FOR variable expansion corrupting names containing exclamation points. I'm going to use some math tricks so that neither delayed expansion nor a CALL is needed to test the number of columns printed so far. If there is no division by 0, then the "success" code is executed, else the "error" code is excecuted.

The code uses the <NUL SET /P trick to print text without a new line. The trick sets ERRORLEVEL to an error, so I use VER to reset the ERRORLEVEL to 0 so that it doesn't fall into the "error" section.



Dave Benham

On top of that, "dir" and "for" apply the wildcard to both long and short filenames (when the latter are enabled, of course). And even though most short filenames are 8.3, some are not.

Caveat being that "???????.txt" can sometimes match files with names longer than 7 characters.

Liviu

Good point! I had run across such behavior before, but forgot all about it.

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I worked out a native batch solution that works with the /S option.

The following simple solutions "works" , but it is all but worthless because it does not indicate the path of each file.

I believe delayed expansion is required to include paths and get decent performance. The delayed expansion must be toggled to prevent corruption of names containing !.

The output format is basically the same as DIR /S /W, except the file counts and total file size are not included. The file counts and total size could be added easily enough, except that batch math only supports numbers to ~2GB. A scan of an entire volume is likely to exceed the limit. At that point a different language would be needed, perhaps JScript or VBScript. (or else a very slow large number batch solution could be used, or a non-native utility with big int support)

Dave Benham