Reconcile files to be deleted with list?

[noprogrammer]

I've got a directory with many files (all with the same extension) and just need to keep a part of them, the rest should be deleted.

The files to keep are stored in the variable %Exceptions% e.g. "foo bar baz" (generated by another process).
I'd like to keep this as flexible as possible, i.e. the script might exclude 0...n files of totally n matches.

I found an interesting approach dealing with directories, however in that case the exceptions were hardcoded in the script.
I'm also unsure about the underlying algorithm: I'll get the total of files with e.g.

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For /f "delims=" %%f In ('dir /b *.log')

but how to design the filter logic for the output?

In %Exceptions% each substring represents a file name (foo, bar, baz → foo.log, bar.log, baz.log), separated by whitespace.

Has anyone got an idea?

[aGerman]

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... ('dir /a-d /b *.log^|findstr /l "%Exceptions%"') ...

... maybe. Just have a look at the help of FINDSTR. There are a lot of options that may help you to define the restrictions for the filter.

Steffen

[noprogrammer]

Basically this works, but it will not only match foo.log, bar.log and baz.log but bar-tender.log or baz-2019.log as well.
Findstr will merely do what supposed to when run like

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... findstr /r /c:"^bar.log$" ...

So I'm not sure if findstr can be used for the filter logic.

[aGerman]

Depends on how the content of variable %Exceptions% exactly looks like. If there is only a single space between your search terms then you can replace them like that:

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"%Exceptions: =.log %"

And if there is no trailing space in the variable then use

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"%Exceptions: =.log %.log"

Also use options /lb instead of only /l.

Steffen

[Compo]

Similarly, but using /X instead of /B and/or /E, as long as your filenames do not themselves contain any space, (or poison) characters:

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FindStr /ILVX "%Exceptions: =.log %.log"

Or alternatively…

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FindStr /XVIC:"%Exceptions: =.log" /C"%.log"

[noprogrammer]

(Not sure if I understood the previous approach.)
Anyway, here's the actual data. First off, I run the line

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<"%ProgramFiles%\Firefox\search.json" jq -r ".visibleDefaultEngines|join(\",\")"

and save its output to a variable which looks like:

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google-2018 bing amazon-en-GB chambers-en-GB ddg ebay-uk twitter wikipedia

or

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google amazondotcom-de bing ddg ebay-de ecosia leo_ende_de wikipedia-de

They're Mozilla search engines with xml extension, i.e. the files are: google-2018.xml, amazon-en-Gb.xml, leo_ende_de.xml etc. Only a fraction of them is supposed to be kept, the rest should be deleted.

[aGerman]

Okay but what is your problem? That you have to replace extension .log with extension .xml in the code?

Steffen

[noprogrammer]

Thanks Steffen, yes, it does work. I've got both cases for "use" and "remove" now:

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For /f "delims=" %%f In ('dir /b *.xml^|findstr /lb "%Exceptions: =.xml %"') Do (...)
For /f "delims=" %%f In ('dir /b *.xml^|findstr /lv "%Exceptions: =.xml %"') Do (...)

So far, it seems to work fine.