How to search files in directory using OR/NOT conditions?

Question

I am able to search files that contain the term plus in a directory using the following command:

dir "*plus*" /s

However, I need to modify the command to search for files whose names contain the terms plus OR vest. In Windows Explorer, I am able to do this by entering search terms joined by OR like this - plus OR vest. How to accomplish this using windows command line?

Answer 1

dir receives a list of patterns so you can just use multiple wildcard patterns

dir /s *plus* *vest*

You may want to use dir /b /s *plus* *vest* instead for saner output

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Or you can also filter the result with findstr

dir /b /s | findstr /i "plus vest"

findstr will find words separated by spaces by default and will return lines that match plus or vest. /i is used to match case-insensitively, you can remove it if you don't want. But this method will be much slower because all the file paths must be printed out to the pipe

Note that this will also find all files in folders named *plus* or *vest*. You can remove /b but the output of dir /b /s | findstr /i "plus vest" will very confusing because you don't know which folder a file is in

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To find (plus OR vest) but NOT hoodie use

dir /b /s *plus* *vest* | findstr /i /v hoodie

But that will also exclude files in folders named *hoodie*. Again removing /b helps but the output would be likely unhelpful. You should use PowerShell instead for such complex things. In fact I avoid writing anything new in cmd, PowerShell is significantly better, you don't have to learn the legacy quirks of cmd. In PowerShell that would be done as

Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Include "*plus*", "*vest*" | Where-Object { $_.Name -notlike "*hoodie*" }

or the shorter aliased version:

ls -R -I "*plus*", "*vest*" | where { $_.Name -notlike "*hoodie*" }

Answer 2

With Powershell, you can use the following command:

Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\Path\To\Your\Files\*" -Include "*plus*", "*vest*"

If you are already in the path:

Get-ChildItem -Path .\* -Include "*plus*", "*vest*"