I prefer to work with a command line so I spend a large part of my day in a DOSbox (Windows Command Prompt). I also prefer to archive my code so I don't have to rely only on Subversion or a backup that may or may not occur.
Currently, I'm archiving to a CD; I copy the contents of my
Projects directory. But I don't want to write the
bin and
obj trees to the CD. The rd (rmdir) command doesn't seem to have support for removing directories that are
somewhere down under the current directory.
It turns out that DOS' FOR command can be used to do this. I had never used the FOR command before today. Basically, what is needed is to do a
DIR /S /B bin. obj. to get a list of the directories I wish to delete, then have the FOR command pass each of them to the
rd /s /q command -- simple...
Of course, it's little bit tricky, and I made it more complex... just because.
So, I wrote two BAT files, the first is intended as a general-purpose script for running a command on the output of a command --
PerformOn.bat:
for /F "usebackq" %%f in (`%~2`) do call %~1 %%f %~3
0)
/F "usebackq" is needed to direct the FOR command to execute the command in the second parameter
1) The tildes (~) are used because the parameters are (or may be) wrapped in quotes (") -- the tilde removes the quotes (I had never heard of this before today)
2) Two percent signs are required for %%f because it's in a file
The other uses it to perform this particular function --
DelBin.bat:
call PerformOn.bat "rd /s /q" "dir /s /b bin. obj." "> nul"
