How do I recursively delete all files or folders whose names match a pattern in Windows?

Question

For the file example, I would like to delete all files matching .+?[a-f0-9]{4}.html (i.e. any html file ending in a four digit hexadecimal). So paged47c.html would be deleted, but page.html would remain.

For the folder example, I would like to delete all folders matching .+?[A-Z]+ (i.e. any folder containing a capital letter). So some-folderSE93_89ds/ would be deleted, but some-folder/ would remain.

I don't work much with the command line, but I could probably get an example involving "del" to work for me. Alternatively, is there a simple GUI program for Windows that would do this?

Answer 1

I would say the easiest way, albeit not the direct route, is to do your specialized dir command (you can use /b and /s switched to make it just list the filename and to recurse directories) and redirect it to a file. Open it in notepad (or insert your favorite editor), search and replace to add "del " to the beginning of the lines, save it off as mydel.bat, and execute.

So an example would be:

dir /s /b *.html > mydel.bat
notepad mydel.bat
call mydel.bat

Answer 2

Use the following line in powershell:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse C:\| where { ! $_.PSIsContainer } | Where-Object {$_.Name -match ".+?[a-f0-9]{4}.html"}

Is for the file case, for the folder case use:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse C:\| Where-Object { $_.PSIsContainer }| Where-Object {$_.Name -match ".+?[A-Z]+"}

Store those both in variables, and then use Remove-Item

Warning: In my command, I am using the root C:\ as the source location. If you do want to pipe it's output to Remove-Item and you are running this as administrator, its a bad idea. At the very least do one of the following:

1. Specifically exclude Windows
2. Using the what-if flag
3. Don't run as administrator (if the files that you are matching are not in a protected directory, it won't matter)
4. Don't run use C:\ but rather from some safer place