How to combine wildcards and spaces (quotes) in an Windows command?

Question

I want to remove directories of the following format:

C:\Program Files\FogBugz\Plugins\cache\PluginName@example.com_NN

NN is a number, so I want to use a wildcard (this is part of a post-build step in Visual Studio). The problem is that I need to combine quotes around the path name (for the space in Program Files) with a wildcard to match the end of the path. I already found out that rd is the remove command that accepts wildcards, but where do I put the quotes? I have tried no ending quote (works for dir), ...example.com*", ...example.com"*, ...example.com_??", ...cache\"PluginName@example.com*, ...cache"\PluginName@example.com*, but none of them work.

(How many commands to remove a file/directory are there in Windows anyway? And why do they all differ in capabilities?)

Answer 1

rmdir does not support wildcards. It only accepts complete filenames.

You can try this alternative:

for /d %f in ("C:\Program Files\FogBugz\Plugins\cache\PluginName@example.com_*") do rmdir /s/q "%~f"

(The /s/q arguments to rmdir do the same thing as rm -rf on Unix. The for /d argument makes for match directory names instead of file names.)

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Remember that the cmd.exe shell does not do wildcard expansion (unlike Unix sh) -- this is handled by the command itself.

Answer 2

You can escape the space with the ^ character: C:\Program^ Files\FogBugz\Plugins\cache\PluginName@example.com_*