Is there an easy way to copy a file if it contains a text string

[Dan Martin]

In ANT it's easy to do that and it's the one function over the years that I've really wished Take Command had.

 

[Charles G]

Could do something with FIND and COPY

 

[vefatica]

Do you mean something like this?

ffind /t"text string" file > nul
if %_? == 0 copy file ...

On one line

if %@exec[ffind /t"text string" file > nul] == 0 copy file ...

 

[Dan Martin]

Yeah, that should work if I put it in a For loop so I can copy all the files in a directory that contain the text string. Thanks! :) I'll give it a try and let you know.

 

[samintz]

If the goal is to copy a bunch of files then an easier solution would be be to use the file names that ffind spits out.

do f in /p ffind /b /c /t"text string" * (copy %f ...)

You can create an alias for that or a function.

alias tcopy=`do f in /p ffind /b /c /t%1 %2 (copy %f %3)`
tcopy "test string" * dest_folder

 

[Charles Dye]

Or maybe redirect to a temp file, then use that as an @file?

 

[vefatica]

Or maybe redirect to a temp file, then use that as an @file?

That's actually what DO /P does.

 

[Dan Martin]

Thanks guys! Excellent advice! I just used the do f etc to find and copy all the PDFs created by a particular user to find the one he said had an incorrect format. It was a lot easier to open up 11 PDFs rather than several hundred. Of course I could have just used the windows explorer search function for that, but next I plan on using it in a script to automatically find logs with certain errors in our printing software.