CODEWITHSUNDEEP
variablesbatch-filesubstring
Roland Willis
Roland Willis

Reputation: 3

How to Get Substring of @FNAME in forfiles command

I want to rename a bunch of files in a directory by stripping their file names down to the first 16 characters but I cannot work out how to get a substring of @FNAME when using the forfiles command in a batch file.

Help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Roland

Upvotes: 0

Views: 3128

Answers (2)

Cristian
Cristian

Reputation: 11

You can use a second bat file and pass @fname like %1 and make the substring here.

Forfiles /m *.* /c "cmd /c call second.bat @fname"

In second.bat

Set v=%1

Set substring=%v:~1,5%

Echo %substring%

Upvotes: 1

Bali C
Bali C

Reputation: 31241

Using forfiles to do this is most likely going to be quite tricky, as I don't think you can set and use variables in the same batch, because you spawn a new cmd for each file ("cmd /c command").

However, the same functionality can easily be achieved using a simple for loop.

setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
for /f "tokens=*" %%a in ('dir C:\yourdir /s /b') do (
set file=%%~na
set ext=%%~xa
set new=!file:~0,16!
ren %%a !new!!ext!
)

That will recurse through all subdirectories as well. If you just want the folder you choose, remove the /s from the dir command.

Also, because you are stripping just the file name, I have made it so it will append the file extension back on after, otherwise the characters in the extension would count towards the 16 character limit.

Upvotes: 2

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