\nWe’ve reached Hump Day of Batch File Week.\nRemember, nobody actually likes batch programming.\nYou merely tolerate it.\n<\/p>\n
\nToday, we’ll find the most recently-created item in a directory.\n(For example, we have a server that holds our daily builds,\nand you might want to write a batch file that automatically\ninstalls the latest build.)\n<\/p>\n
\nThere may be better ways, but what I do is ask for a list\nsorted oldest-to-newest,\nand then choose the last one.\n<\/p>\n
\nfor \/f %%i in ('dir \/b\/a-d\/od\/t:c') do set LAST=%%i\necho The most recently created file is %LAST%\n<\/pre>\n\nThis trick works by asking the dir<\/code> command\nto list just the names (\/b<\/code>)\nof just the files \/a-d<\/code>,\nsorted by date (\/od<\/code>),\nbased on the creation time (\/t:c<\/code>).\n<\/p>\n\nEach time a new file is reported,\nits name is stored in the LAST<\/code> variable,\noverwriting the previous one.\nWhen the loop finishes,\nthe LAST<\/code> variable contains the name of the\nnewest file,\nsince that’s the one that didn’t get overwritten.\n<\/p>\n\nYou can tweak the command line to perform other queries.\nFor example, if you want the newest file, then just ask\nfor a reverse sort (\/o-d<\/code>).\nIf you want the file sorted by modified time rather than\ncreation time,\nthen use \/t:w<\/code>.\nYou get the idea.\n<\/p>\n\nLimitations<\/b>:\nThe implementation above\nassumes that no files contain spaces in their name.\nRemoving this limitation is left as an exercise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We’ve reached Hump Day of Batch File Week. Remember, nobody actually likes batch programming. You merely tolerate it. Today, we’ll find the most recently-created item in a directory. (For example, we have a server that holds our daily builds, and you might want to write a batch file that automatically installs the latest build.) There […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-6993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-code"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"
We’ve reached Hump Day of Batch File Week. Remember, nobody actually likes batch programming. You merely tolerate it. Today, we’ll find the most recently-created item in a directory. (For example, we have a server that holds our daily builds, and you might want to write a batch file that automatically installs the latest build.) There […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}