{"id":70453,"date":"2005-02-11T21:04:00","date_gmt":"2005-02-11T21:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.technet.microsoft.com\/heyscriptingguy\/2005\/02\/11\/how-can-i-use-a-wildcard-character-to-delete-folders\/"},"modified":"2005-02-11T21:04:00","modified_gmt":"2005-02-11T21:04:00","slug":"how-can-i-use-a-wildcard-character-to-delete-folders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/how-can-i-use-a-wildcard-character-to-delete-folders\/","title":{"rendered":"How Can I Use a Wildcard Character to Delete Folders?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hey, \n

Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I delete folders based on a wildcard character? For example, how can I delete all the folders whose name starts with December<\/I>?

— RR<\/P>\"Spacer\"\"Hey,\"Script<\/A> \n

Hey, RR. Well, that depends. If you\u2019re running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, you can actually use<\/I> a wildcard character to identify and then delete all the folders whose name starts with December<\/I>. If you\u2019re running Windows 2000, you can achieve the same net result: you can identify and delete all the folders whose name starts with December<\/I>. It\u2019s just that you\u2019ll have to do it in a more clumsy, brute-force fashion.<\/P>\n

Let\u2019s start by taking a look at an XP\/2003 script that identifies (but doesn\u2019t yet delete) all the folders whose name starts with December<\/I>:<\/P>

strComputer = “.”\nSet objWMIService = GetObject(“winmgmts:\\\\” & strComputer & “\\root\\cimv2”)<\/p>\n
Set colFolders = objWMIService.ExecQuery _\n    (“SELECT * FROM Win32_Directory WHERE FileName LIKE ‘December%'”)<\/p>\n
For Each objFolder in colFolders\n    Wscript.Echo objFolder.Name\nNext\n<\/PRE>\n
The key to this script lies in the WQL query:<\/P>
SELECT * FROM Win32_Directory WHERE FileName LIKE ‘December%’\n<\/PRE>\n
What we\u2019re doing here is selecting all the folders that have a FileName<\/B> like December<\/I>. FileName is the WMI property corresponding to what we would call the folder name. (And, yes, there\u2019s sometimes a difference between the name we use for something and the name WMI uses for that same thing.) For example, if we have a folder with the path C:\\Scripts\\Reports\\December, the FileName is December<\/I>. <\/P>\n
LIKE \u2018December%\u2019<\/B> simply means, \u201cWhere the FileName starts with December<\/I>.\u201d The percent sign (%) is the wildcard character (equivalent to the * used most other places as the wildcard character). In this case, the wildcard indicates that we want folder names that start with December<\/I>, but we don\u2019t care what – if anything – comes after the word December<\/I>. What if wanted to look for folders whose names ended<\/I> with the word December<\/I>? In that case, we\u2019d put the wildcard at the beginning of the string, like so:<\/P>
SELECT * FROM Win32_Directory WHERE FileName LIKE ‘%December’\n<\/PRE>\n
And what if we wanted folders whose name simply contained the word December<\/I> (for example, Reports_December_2005<\/I>)? In that case, we\u2019d put a wildcard before and after the string:<\/P>
SELECT * FROM Win32_Directory WHERE FileName LIKE ‘%December%’\n<\/PRE>\n
The LIKE operator is available only on Windows XP and Windows 2003. If you want to perform this task on a Windows 2000 computer, you\u2019ll have to retrieve the list of all<\/I> the folders on the machine and then check to see if any of them have a folder name (FileName) starting with December<\/I>. That\u2019s what we do with this script:<\/P>
strComputer = “.”\nSet objWMIService = GetObject(“winmgmts:\\\\” & strComputer & “\\root\\cimv2”)<\/p>\n
Set colFolders = objWMIService.ExecQuery(“SELECT * FROM Win32_Directory”)<\/p>\n
For Each objFolder in colFolders\n    If Left(objFolder.FileName, 8) = “december” Then\n        Wscript.Echo objFolder.Name\n    End If\nNext\n<\/PRE>\n
With this script we get back a collection of all the folders on a computer, and then check each one to see if the first (leftmost) 8 characters happen to be december<\/I>. If they are, we echo the folder name; if not, we move on to the next folder in the collection.<\/P>\n
This works just fine, although it does take a bit longer to complete. On a test computer with a couple thousand folders, the XP\/2003 version took around 15 seconds to complete; the Windows 2000 version took over a minute. But at least it does the job.<\/P>\n
Now, what about deleting all the folders that you find? Well, to do that, just substitute the Delete<\/B> method for the line of code where we echo the folder name. For example, here\u2019s the XP\/2003 version of a script that both finds and deletes all folders whose name starts with December<\/I>:<\/P>
On Error Resume Next<\/p>\n
strComputer = “.”\nSet objWMIService = GetObject(“winmgmts:\\\\” & strComputer & “\\root\\cimv2”)<\/p>\n
Set colFolders = objWMIService.ExecQuery _\n    (“SELECT * FROM Win32_Directory WHERE FileName LIKE ‘December%'”)<\/p>\n
For Each objFolder in colFolders\n    objFolder.Delete\nNext\n<\/PRE>\n
Needless to say, be careful about running this particular script; after all, it will delete all the folders it finds whose name starts with December<\/I>. In some cases, it might be a good idea to first retrieve a list of all these folders and make sure there aren\u2019t any surprises in there (that is, folders you don\u2019t really want to delete that just happen to have a name starting with December<\/I>) before you start deleting things willy-nilly.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I delete folders based on a wildcard character? For example, how can I delete all the folders whose name starts with December?— RR Hey, RR. Well, that depends. If you\u2019re running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, you can actually use a wildcard character to identify and then delete all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":595,"featured_media":87096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11,3,12,5],"class_list":["post-70453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scripting","tag-folders","tag-scripting-guy","tag-storage","tag-vbscript"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"
Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I delete folders based on a wildcard character? For example, how can I delete all the folders whose name starts with December?— RR Hey, RR. Well, that depends. If you\u2019re running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, you can actually use a wildcard character to identify and then delete all […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/595"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}