A paid service downloads video files in AVI format. Along with the videos come other files that are no longer needed after the download is finished.
How can a simple script delete just the files that are not of type nAVI in the sub folders in the download directory.?
I'd just perform the following

COPY or MOVE your *.AVI files to a different directory. * I like copying vs move, but if your tight on hdd space you can tell it to move the files instead of making a 2nd copy at the alt location.

DELETE all contents at thisoriginal directory that the AVI's were copied or moved from, you can then copy or move your AVI files back to original directory or keep them at this AVI only alternate directory.

This run from the location that the AVI's reside would create a copy of them as well as any subfolders containing them and only AVI files to be copied to an alternate location such as C:\my_AVIs\ . I would create this drop directory before running this instruction so that the location to copy files to is satisfied.

Code: [Select]xcopy *.avi c:\my_AVIs\*.* /s/d/yThen run

Code: [Select]erase *.* /f /q to force deletion of all files from the original location ( THIS DELETES ALL FILES from directory by which it is run without prompting to confirm you want to do this, so be careful )

If you want to be prompted you can just use Code: [Select]erase *.* /f and select Y or N to proceed

If you need to delete most data, but also keep some data at the parent directory, you would want to perform a custom deletion of file types by extensions such as if you have a parent directory with AVI , TXT, and DOC files in addition to a program with an EXE there and BIN, DLL, LOG, and other files there, you will not want to run the erase instruction above as for it would wipe out all contents and you need to retain some.

So to ditch the TXT and DOC files for example you would simply run the following:

Code: [Select]erase *.doc
erase *.txtThis one-line batch script will delete all files in its own folder that do not have the extension .avi

Save it with the .bat extension

@for %%A in (*.*) do if not "%%~xA"==".avi" del "%%A"

or open a prompt in that folder and paste this

@for %A in (*.*) do if not "%~xA"==".avi" del "%A"




Salmon Trout, great pone-line solution.
Thank you both. You have MADE my day.Quote from: Salmon Trout on May 25, 2013, 02:41:55 PM

@for %%A in (*.*) do if not "%%~xA"==".avi" del "%%A"

Add the /i switch or it will delete .AVI files or .aVi files etc. The case insensitive switch will fix that.

Code: [Select]for %%A in (*.*) do if /i not "%%~xA"==".avi" del "%%A"

Add the /i switch or it will delete .AVI files or .aVi

Not mattering if it deletes your collection of AVI files?

You can force lower case with a rename of the extension.
But then it would not be a one-liner.

rename *.AVI *.avi