How do I write a batch file to delete folders and files on a time basis?

Question

Exact Duplicates:

• How to write a batch file to delete the files which are 5 days or older from a folder?
• write a batch file to delete 6 days older files

Answer 1

Batch can be surprisingly powerful but I don't think the kind of date manipulation you want will be practical.

You can use FOR to split the date into elements and then use SET /A to do the subtraction, but then you're going to need a huge number of IF and GOTO statements to handle cases like subtracting an hour from half past midnight on the 1st of January.

I think you'd be better off investigating VBS or Powershell.

Answer 2

You may want to try this script to delete files from a folder that are older than 1 hour.

# Script Delete1Hour.txt
var str folder, list, file
cd $folder
lf -n "*" $folder ($ftype=="f") AND ( $fmtime < addtime(diff("-10000")) ) > $list
while ($list <> "")
do
    lex "1" $list > $file
    system del ("\""+$file+"\"")
done

This is biterscripting. The important command is

lf -n "*" $folder ($ftype=="f") AND ( $fmtime < addtime(diff("-10000")) )

Which tells biterscripting - give me all entries in folder $folder with names that match the patten "*" whose file type is "f" (flat file, not directory), and whose file modification time ($fmtime) is earlier than 1 hour. See the documentation for the lf command at http://www.biterscripting.com/helppages/lf.html .

Save the script in file C:/Scripts/Delete1Hour.txt, run it as

script  "C:/Scripts/Delete1Hour.txt" folder("C:/testfolder")

It will delete all files from C:/testfolder that are older than 1 hour.