Author Archives: Eelco Ligtvoet

About Eelco Ligtvoet

Dutch nerd

Cmd.exe: Workaround for “if not exist *.*” and other uses for the FOR command

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One of the annoying things in Windows XP/2003 and later, is that the construct if not exist c:\test\*.* echo No files! does not work as expected if c:\test is empty. This seems to be due to the fact that Windows regards the “.” and “..” file entries as valid files… Read more »

CMD.exe recursion in batch: Deleting empty subdirectories

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This article addresses one specific use case for recursion in batch: Recursively looping through a directory (also called a folder) and its sub directories. Normally, this is a pain, and it took me a while to come up with an algorithm that works. For recursion to work correctly, you need:… Read more »