WAD [Discrepancy] Have rmdir work like described in the docs

[nickles]

The docs for rmdir state:

"File Selection
Supports command dialog, extended wildcards, ranges, multiple file names, and include lists."

Unfortunately wildcards (and maybe others) are not supported, so that e.g.

rmdir /qs hsperfdata_*

fails with

TCC: (Sys) The directory name is invalid.
"D:\temp\hsperfdata_*"

 

[vefatica]

It's the "/s". See the help. It's dangerous enough by itself. I'm not surprised that it expects the name of a directory.

It's easy enough to get around:

do dir in /a:d hsperfdata_* ( rmdir /qs %dir )

 

[vefatica]

It sounds like you're cleaning %TEMP. Do you get directories with names like "de96df7b3a4f5ed2f1e9f6375e785c90", i.e., 32 hex characters?

I do, and though I don't know who creates them, I know from experience that they can be deleted safely. It took a while, but I just cooked up this command which might be useful in a CLEANTEMP.BTM.

do dir in /p dir /a:d /b /ne ::"^[0-9a-fA-F]{32,32}$" ( rmdir /q /s %dir )

Apparently, you can't give DO a regex file spec ... too bad.

 

[nickles]

@vefatica

I'd like to replace some of MSys's "rm -rf ..."s - which sadly are much slower than "del" (which is not the fault of "rm" but that of MSys). Using your method would require me to replace quite a lot of "rm -rf" commands with the above mentioned "do" command which seems quite a bit of overhead to me. And yes, it's possibly dangerous - but that's my problem ;-); btw. the ones of us still using the "good ol' command line" are surely aware of this...

Anyway, either the docs are wrong, or the command.

 

[RogerB]

Anyway, either the docs are wrong, or the command.

Check the help for the /S option of rmdir, it explicitly states that it can't be used with wildcards.

 

[rconn]

As Vince said, the docs are correct and RD does not support wildcards with /S. (IMHO that would be a disastrous combination.)

 

[JohnQSmith]

Ran into the same thing today cleaning up a folder tree I was playing with. However, by changing the command slightly (from "*" (asterisk) to "." (dot)) it did an override of the wildcard limitation. It even prompted me with a wildcard...

[C:\test] $ dir

 Volume in drive C is unlabeled      Serial number is 262b:d729
 Directory of  C:\test\*

 9/20/2016  11:32         <DIR>    .
 9/20/2016  11:32         <DIR>    ..
 9/20/2016  11:33         <DIR>    dir1
 9/20/2016  11:33         <DIR>    dir2
 9/20/2016  11:34         <DIR>    dir3
                   0 bytes in 0 files and 5 dirs
      66,485,268,480 bytes free

[C:\test] $ rd /s *
TCC: (Sys) The directory name is invalid.
 "C:\test\*"

[C:\test] $ rd /s .
C:\test\* : Are you sure (Y/N)? Y

[C:\test] $ dir

 Volume in drive C is unlabeled      Serial number is 262b:d729
 Directory of  C:\test\*

 9/23/2016   9:53         <DIR>    .
 9/23/2016   9:53         <DIR>    ..
                   0 bytes in 0 files and 2 dirs
      66,493,485,056 bytes free

 

[gentzel]

Sounds right to me. "." is a directory name, not a wildcard.