I need a CMD batch file to delete all the log files. My company makes plugins for their product and the path is something as follows:
C:/Program Files/product/../plugins/../plugin_Path/pluginOne/audit/log
C:/Program Files/product/../plugins/../plugin_Path/pluginOne/audit/log-archive
C:/Program Files/product/../Root/plugins/../plugin_Path/pluginTwo/audit/log
C:/Program Files/product/../Root/plugins/../plugin_Path/pluginTwo/audit/log-archive
Now I need to delete all the log and log-archive folders with its contains.
Currently I wrote a samll program like this:
@echo off
color 02
for %%A in (
"C:/Program Files/product/plugins/plugin_Path/pluginOne/audit/log"
"C:/Program Files/product/plugins/plugin_Path/pluginOne/audit/log-archive"
"C:/Program Files/product/plugins/plugin_Path/pluginTwo/audit/log"
"C:/Program Files/product/plugins/plugin_Path/pluginTwo/audit/log-archive"
) do (
del /Q %%A
echo Deleted %%A
)
echo All files deleted
pause
echo Program ended
But here I need to insert all the log paths manually. I am looking for a solution where I could point the parent folder (say Program Files/Company) and it could traverse all the files inside and will delete all the log and log-archival folders with its contains. I am a QA person have good QA experience but no experience on batch programming and I dont have much time and support team is not present. [Need help]. There are more than 1K log files are present.
First, as explained by the Microsoft documentation Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces, the directory separator on Windows is \ and not / as on Linux/Mac. / is used on Windows for options as you can see on your code for example on /Q. So use in future \ in file/folder paths. The Windows file system accessing kernel functions automatically replace all forward slashes by backslashes before accessing the file systems, but writing code depending on automatic error correction is never a good idea.
The task to delete all folders with name log or log-archive in a specified folder and all its subfolders can be done with a single command line.
@for /F "delims=" %%I in ('dir "%ProgramFiles%\product\plugins\plugin_Path\log*" /AD /B /S 2^>nul ^| %SystemRoot%\System32\findstr.exe /E /I /R "\\log \\log-archive"') do @rd /Q /S "%%I" 2>nul
FOR with option /F runs in a separate command process started with cmd.exe /C (more precise with %ComSpec% /C) in background the command line in '... ' which is here:
dir "C:\Program Files\product\plugins\plugin_Path\log*" /AD /B /S 2>nul | C:\Windows\System32\findstr.exe /E /I /R "\\log \\log-archive"
The command DIR outputs to handle STDOUT
/B/AD (attribute directory)log*C:\Program Files\product\plugins\plugin_Path/S/S.It could be that DIR does not find any file system entry matching these criteria. In this case an error message is output by DIR to handle STDERR. This error output is redirected with 2>nul to device NUL to suppress it.
The standard output of DIR is redirected with | to handle STDIN of FINDSTR which runs
/I a case-insensitive/R\log or \log-archive (space is interpreted as OR)/E.All lines matching these search criteria are output by FINDSTR to handle STDOUT of background command process. This filtering of output of DIR with FINDSTR is necessary to avoid the deletion of a directory which is named for example LogToKeep also found and output by DIR.
Read the Microsoft article about Using Command Redirection Operators for an explanation of 2>nul and |. The redirection operators > and | must be escaped with caret character ^ on FOR command line to be interpreted as literal characters when Windows command interpreter processes this command line before executing command FOR which executes the embedded command line with using a separate command process started in background.
FOR with option /F captures output to handle STDOUT of started command process and processes this output line by line after started cmd.exe terminated itself. Empty lines are always ignored by FOR which do not occur here. Lines starting with a semicolon are also ignored by default because of eol=; is the default definition for end of line option. But a full qualified folder path cannot contain a semicolon at beginning because the folder path starts either with a drive letter or with a backslash in case of a UNC path. So default end of line option can be kept in this case. FOR would split up by default every line into substrings with using normal space and horizontal tab as string delimiters and would assign just first space/tab separated string to specified loop variable. This line splitting behavior is not wanted here as the folder path contains definitely a space character and the entire folder path is needed and not just the string up to first space. For that reason delims= is used to specify an empty list of delimiters which disables line splitting behavior.
FOR executes for every directory output by DIR passing FINDSTR filter with full path the command RD to remove the directory quietly because of option /Q and with all files and subdirectories because of /S.
The deletion of the directory could fail because of missing NTFS permissions, or the directory to delete or one of its subdirectories is current directory of a running process, or a file in the directory to delete is currently opened by a running process in a manner which denies deletion of the file while being opened, or the directory to delete does not exist anymore because it was deleted already before in FOR loop. The error message output by command RD to handle STDERR is in this case redirected to device NUL to suppress it.
Please note that command RD deletes all log and log-archives directories and not just the files and subdirectories in these directories. It is unclear from your question what exactly should be deleted by the batch file.
It is of course also possible to replace rd /Q /S "%%I" by del /A /F /Q "%%I\*" to delete just all files including hidden and read-only files quietly in the directory assigned with full path to loop variable I.
@ left to command FOR and command RD just suppress the output of those commands before execution by Windows command processor cmd.exe. Both @ are not needed if this single command line is used in a batch file containing before @echo off.
For understanding the used commands and how they work, open a command prompt window, execute there the following commands, and read entirely all help pages displayed for each command very carefully.
del /?dir /?findstr /?for /?rd /?