The other day, I needed to make an urgent change on a Windows server and made modifications across multiple folders. Since Git was not installed on the server, I thought it would be difficult to identify which files I had changed. However, after doing some research, I realized that I could quickly solve this issue with a command I had never used before. This command was the: forfiles
forfiles /P "C:\Project_Folder" /S /D +2 /C "cmd /c echo @path"
Explanation of this command:
/P "C:\Project_Folder": Specifies the path of the folder you want to scan./S: This tells the command to scan subfolders./D +2: Lists files that have been modified in the last two days. However, if you need to use a specific date, this parameter can be updated as follows:/D +13.10.2024(lists files modified after this date)./C "cmd /c echo @path": Displays the full file paths on the screen.@pathrepresents the full path of the file.
As we will understand from here, the forfiles command actually works like a forloop, detecting the files in the criteria we provide and executes a separate command for each.
My goal was to identify the files I modified and export these files to a separate folder while maintaining the folder structure. Then I took these files to my own computer and planned to create a new commit in Git.
I performed this operation by using the copy command instead of the echo command:
forfiles /P "C:\Project_Folder" /S /D +13.09.2024 /C "cmd /c copy @path C:\Users\User\Desktop\Commit"
This command copied all files that changed after the specified date to the commit folder. However, the folder structure was not preserved when copying files. I applied the xcopy command to protect the folder structure:
forfiles /P "C:\Project_Folder" /S /D +13.09.2024 /C "cmd /c xcopy @path C:\Users\User\Desktop\Commit@relpath /S /Y"
Details of this command:
@pathSpecifies the full path of the file.@relpathIt refers to the file path after the specified scan folder./SAllows copying with subfolders./YAutomatically answersYESto the question “Overwrite (Y/N)?”.
However, with the forfiles command, not only the files come, folders were also included in the loop into a separate iteration and caused problems with the xcopy command. Therefore, since I was only interested in files, the folders had to be disabled. I used the @isdir variable for this.
forfiles /P "C:\Project_Folder" /S /D +13.09.2024 /C "cmd /c if @isdir==FALSE xcopy @path C:\Users\User\Desktop\WebCommit\Commit\@relpath /S /Y
Everything was great except one thing. For each file that came with forfiles, xcopy asked us a question in the following way:
robots.txt specify a file name or directory name on the target
(F = file, D = directory)?
It was inefficient to manually press the “F” key for each file. I created a txt file to solve this problem. I just wrote “F” in it and integrated this file with the command.
forfiles /P "C:\Project_Folder" /S /D +13.09.2024 /C "cmd /c if @isdir==FALSE xcopy @path C:\Users\User\Desktop\WebCommit\Commit\@relpath /S /Y<C:\Users\User\Desktop\WebCommit\DirOrFolder.txt"
In this way, I automatically answered the question the xcopy command asked for each file.
By automating file detection and copying with CMD, I was able to simulate a basic version of Git functionality in a non-Git environment. This approach allows for easy identification and extraction of modified files while preserving the folder structure.
I hope this solution proves useful for your file management needs too!