Help: Wildcards

[ThomasLMahoney]

How do I use wildcard characters in commands? The closest I've gotten is:

Code: Select all

xcopy C:\"My Documents"\*.doc* D:\Documents\College\

Where *.doc* is any Word file that has the extension .docm or .docx. But it doesn't work. Can someone help me?

[Squashman]

So you are basically saying you want *.DOCM and *.DOCX but not *.DOC ?

Right now your code would copy all three of them.

[aGerman]

I can't find any fault except what Squashman already mentioned and that you should enclose the entire path in quotes instead of only the folder name with spaces.

Code: Select all

xcopy "C:\My Documents\*.doc*" "D:\Documents\College\"

But "it doesn't work" isn't an adequate description of what happened. Did you get an error message? Was nothing copied at all? Were the wrong files copied? ...

Regards
aGerman

[alan_b]

you should enclose the entire path in quotes instead of only the folder name with spaces.

Please teach me some more - I thought I only needed to enclose spaces.
Is the problem that "*.doc" could expand to
"My file name has spaces also.doc"

Regards
Alan

[foxidrive]

Microsoft parsing can accept the type of quoting you used originally but I doubt it will work in all cases, whereas when the entire path is quoted then it is guaranteed to work.

This is untested:

Code: Select all

@echo off
for %%a in (*.docm *.docx) do  xcopy "C:\My Documents\%%a" "D:\Documents\College\"

With respect to the term *.doc
when cmd searches for files it matches the short filename as well as the long filename, and in a long filename the first three characters of an extension are used for the short filename - so "my file.docx" might use a short filename of myfile~1.doc and so is matched when searching for *.doc and also when searching for *.doc*