popd

Recoursively counting files by extension in a windows shell script

It took me sort of lightyears to get this tiny piece of code running. Does not seem much logic to incorporate, uuh? Some looping and counting and printing. However, scripting this old windows shell eventually turned out a nightmare .. Ok, I learned a lot on the way to this script, about delayed expansion in nested loops (blocks) or assignments of arithmetic expressions. But the persisting lesson learned is: next time install python or something comparable first (or go and learn power shell).

Well, at the end of the day i again and again noticed how much I profit from the knowledge available on the net. So I’m going to share this script back for everyone having an interest.

Remarks:

  • get me a count of all files of type (or extension) %1, recoursing any dir within the current dir
  • the pushd / popd stuff is used because %%A cannot be used following “for /r” 😉
  • the !CNT! is used because the changes in the inner loop are not visible to the outer one 😉 😉
echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
for /f %%A in ('dir /b/a:d') do (
  pushd %%A
  set CNT=0
  for /r %%X in (*.%1) do ( set /a CNT+=1 )
  echo %%A !CNT!
  popd
)

Enjoy!