Suggestions for a Bulk File Cleaning Program for Win XP

[mouselock]

I'm in need of something that replicates the Unix rm command easily from Windows XP. Recursive traversal and wildcard deletion is really important. However, it'd be nice if it worked through a graphical layer that showed me the files I was going to be deleting first so I can do a quick scan to make sure nothing that I need is in there. Anyone know of such a program?

The most intuitive approach (del) just did something that makes me very reticent to use it. To me:

del /p /s ck* .

Ought to recursively delete all files beginning with the characters ck from the current directory and all subsequent subdirectories. It doesn't. (Hence the /p, to make sure my test didn't screw me.) I know how to make it work right, but frankly I don't want to leave my data up to me remembering to do it DOS-wise instead of Unix-wise.

[Talisker]

I'm in need of something that replicates the Unix rm command easily from Windows XP.

Try this. It gives you your old friend the bash prompt, along with all the tools you're accustomed to :)

[mouselock]

I'm in need of something that replicates the Unix rm command easily from Windows XP.

Try this. It gives you your old friend the bash prompt, along with all the tools you're accustomed to :)

Heh. The problem being that it's still pretty unforgiving. I'm lazy these days; I want my programs to let me correct errors rather than me having to proactively ensure I don't make them. (It's why I don't run Linux any more!)

Also, tcsh > bash. :P

[Talisker]

Also, tcsh > bash. :P

tcsh -- ick. If it were up to me, everything would use ksh.

[Kevin J Baird]

Hehe...

You want to do this...

del /S ck*.*

That will work for you. You need to add the wildcard to the extension as wel as the name.

K

[Igor Muravyev]

I'm in need of something that replicates the Unix rm command easily from Windows XP.

Try this. It gives you your old friend the bash prompt, along with all the tools you're accustomed to :)

Or this: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserv...w/default.mspx

It's easier to switch to Linux though ;).

[mouselock]

Appreciate the useful help. (Switch to unix isn't useful. ;P I moved the entire office to Windows because it's reasonably more apparent what to do when you need to do something in Windows than when you need to do something in Unix for people who've never used Unix, and I have no desire to delay my graduation in order to work as the office sysadmin. :P )

However, I'm still hoping someone has a suggestion for a graphically applicable program that doesn't screw me if I do the (horrible but occasionally happens anyway) typo of:

del /s ck *.*

(I fondly remember the time I put that extra space in there while doing something in Slackware and deleted my account, including all of my cool bookmarks and custom X scripts. :evil: )

[Igor Muravyev]

Don't root under the influence :)

[Kevin J Baird]

Only thing I can think of is to get youself a good undelete program. That way if you do that, you can undelete it all back. You just have to make sure you don't add anything to your PC in between you erasing it all and then trying to recover it. There are also programs that will shove your Dos deletes into your trashcan. I've never used them though. I'm not doing a lot of batch erasing on a daily basis.

K

[mouselock]

It's amazing how devoid of reasonable utility graphical clients are. I can find 40 different programs that automatically delete all traces of pr0nz from my IE cache, but not one that does the graphical equivalent of command line file manipulation. I would think at least someone else would have need for such thing.

For the time being, I settled on just using WinZip to archive the files I need instead. (The end goal is the same, I need to archive my difficult to reproduce data for posterity and toss all the chaff which gets generated because it's easy to look at instead of the compiled format.) I don't relish the thought of Winzip dealing with multi-gigabyte files, though. :/