Question

I have a command line which copies files from folder A to folder B:

copy A\* B\

I would now like to delete all files in B that are present in A, non-recursively. I can list the files in A like this:

dir /b /a-d A

With the output being:

f0.txt
f1.txt
f2.txt

Here is the pseudocode for what I would like to do:

foreach $1 in <dir /b /a-d A output>:
  del B\$1

Is there a windows command-line syntax that will execute a command, using the output of another command as an input? I am aware of the piping operator ( | ) but do not know of a way that this could be used to accomplish this task. Any help would be appreciate.

Restriction: Only commands available by default in Windows 7.

Answer 1

You can iterate over files with

for %x in (*) do ...

which is also a lot more robust than trying to iterate over the output of a command for this use case.

So

for %f in (A\*) do del "B\%~nxf"

or, if you need this in a batch file instead of the command line:

for %%f in (A\*) do del "B\%%~nxf"

%~nxf returns only the file name and extension of each file since it will be prefixed with A\ and you want to delete it in B.

Add > nul 2>&1 to suppress any output (error messages may appear when you try deleting files that don’t exist).

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Just for completeness, you can in fact iterate over the output of a command in almost the same way:

for /f %x in ('some command') do ...

but there are several problems with doing this and in the case of iterating over dir output it’s rarely necessary, hence I don’t recommend it.

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And since you are on Windows 7, you have PowerShell as well:

Get-ChildItem A\* | ForEach-Object { Remove-Item ('B\' + $_.Name) }

or shorter:

ls A\* | % { rm B\$($_.Name) }