Deleting all files that do not match a certain pattern - Windows command line

Question

Deleting items via the command-line is pretty easy.

del /options filename.extension

Now, suppose I want to delete all files which do not end with .jpg in a folder, how would I do that.

The thing is, I have a piece of software that converts all specified images to .jpg, but it leaves the originals, which I don't need anymore.

It would be much more efficient to execute a single statement, compared to doing multiple statements for every different filetype.

Answer 1

I would do it like this:

attrib +r *.jpg
del /q *
attrib -r *.jpg

This will first make all JPG files read-only, delete everything else (it will automatically skip read-only files), and then make the JPG files writeable again.

Answer 2

That's actually pretty easy.

You'll need for to iterate over the files and then simply look for the extension:

for %f in (*) do if not %~xf==.jpg del "%f"

should do the trick (code here).

Answer 3

Powershell to the rescue
^{In times of Windows 7/8 it's the successor of the good old command line}

Del C:\myFolder\* -exclude '*.jpg'

Del is an alias for Remove-Item. It has several options like recurse, include, exclude and filter (use this for RegEx)

You have to add \* to include files in a given folder

Answer 4

I know it's not answering your question directly, but have you looked at the options on your converter to see if:

1. It can delete the originals itself

or

2. Write the .jpg's to a new folder?

Answer 5

I was looking for a way to find all files that did NOT have the extension ".mp3" in a directory TREE on Windows 7 (NTFS volume) containing perhaps 20,000 files in several hundred directories of various depths... so after a bit of angst, I used:

cd <theplace>
dir /S | find /V "<DIR>" | find /V "Total" | find /V "bytes" | find /V "Directory" | find /V "Volume" | find /V ".mp3" | more /S

this listed the files that did not match the .mp3 after stripping out everything related to the DIR command output... 99% works... unless the file that doesn't match is named one of the keywords in the standard DIR output - perhaps there's a way to make DIR report less header/summary info - but I didn't bother as this got most of the way there.

Answer 6

Another way to delete all files matching a filename is shown below. The for loop list's all files and the if NOT matches by filename (without directory name).

for /r %f in (*) do if not %~nxf == abc.xml del "%f"