Windows Server How ToYour Windows Server Knowledge Base

Windows server 2003 has very nice tool “forfiles.exe” which provides you with quick and nice file search function.

If you want to use it with your Windows XP machine download it from here .

This tool can be played with mass of functions and in this article i`ll show how to use it with some of them.

For example i want to search through all *.log files in C:\Windows folder and subfolders.

If i find any *.log file there that size is greater than 1MB i want to export  path, size and modify time information of that file into C:\Data\LogFileInfo.txt .

In that case open command line and type:

forfiles.exe /p C:\Windows /s /m *.log /c “cmd /c IF @fsize GTR 1000000 (echo @path @fsize @fdate)” >C:\Data\LogFileInfo.txt

Syntax:

/p – what path to search
/m – what file type to search
/s – include subfolders
GTR – greater than

I hate this one really…

Then path to file exceeds 255 symbols it becames corrupted and you can have very hard time to delete or rename it.

Ok, how to deal with this.

At this case you have three choices:

1. Dont use too long paths! Use short names for you folders and avoid naming folders this way:

“Very important documents for financial department that were copied from local storage at 20080607″

2. If you did already,  you can try to follow path to file and try to rename some very long folder names to shorter one.

3. You can use third party software that will run on your Windows server 2003, Windows XP and even older machines to deal with these files.

One of really great and free utils is “DelinvFile”.

You can download it from here .

If you want to have great tool for synchronizing files and folders over few locations for free grab “Allway Sync” tool from here .

It will work on Windows server 2003/2008 and Windows XP/Vista machines. I never tried but website states that it works on Windows 98/ME/2000 too.

How to #Tools by Thomas