How can I check the time stamp creation of a file in a Windows batch script?

Question

I need help how do check files in particular folders with time stamp older than 2 days then will remove or delete or copy to other place?

Answer 1

Not sure about deleting, but you can use RoboCopy (which is part of Windows 7). The parameter: /MAXAGE:n will copy the files older than n - I normally do a copy to a backup folder and later I do a "delete" all from that directory once I'm sure.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

A simple FOR loop with a SET command using the ~t modifier returns the last-modified date of the files in a directory.

See this example

@echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
echo Files changed today %date%
FOR %%A IN (*.*) DO (
  set tf=%%~tA
  set fd=!tf:~0,10!
  if !fd!==%date% (
    echo  %%F !tf! 
  )
)

See HELP FOR and HELP SET for detailed information.

But, for comparing dates beyond the simple comparison showed above, you need to extract each date component

set dd=!tf:~0,2!
set mm=!tf:~3,2!
set yyyy=!tf:~6,4!

But, wait, extracting the date components in a BAT file is a very tricky issue, because %DATE% and the ~t modifier format the date using the short-date format, that is fully (endlessly) customizable. One user may configure its system to return Fri040811 while another user may choose 08/04/2011. It's a complete nightmare for a BAT programmer.

One possible solution is to temporarily change the format. See this example.

@echo off
echo System Date Time = %date% %time%
reg copy "HKCU\Control Panel\International" "HKCU\Control Panel\International-Temp" /f >nul
reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v sShortDate /d "yyyy-MM-dd" /f >nul
reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v sTimeFormat /d "HH:mm:ss" /f >nul
echo Normalized Date Time = %date% %time%
set dd=%date:~8,2%
set mm=%date:~5,2%
set yyyy=%date:~0,4%
reg copy "HKCU\Control Panel\International-Temp" "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /f >nul

And finally you should do the arithmetic with dates, you need to transform the date in DD MM YYYY to a number of days, which is not obvious neither. Here is some code to do this transformation.

:days
:: Algorithm based on Fliegel-Van Flandern algorithm from the Astronomical Almanac,
:: provided by Doctor Fenton on the Math Forum (http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/51907.html),
:: and converted to batch code by Ron Bakowski.
SET /A Month1 = ( 1%MM% %% 100 - 14 ) / 12
SET /A Year1  = %YYYY% + 4800
SET /A days = 1461 * ( %Year1% + %Month1% ) / 4 + 367 * ( (1%MM% %% 100) - 2 -12 * %Month1% ) / 12 - ( 3 * ( ( %Year1% + %Month1% + 100 ) / 100 ) ) / 4 + (1%DD% %% 100) - 32075
SET Month1=
SET Year1=
goto :eof

the strange idiom (1%MM% %% 100) is used to fix a problem with the way SET /A interprets as octal the numbers that begin with zero.

so, putting all those pieces together...

@echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion enableextensions

reg copy "HKCU\Control Panel\International" "HKCU\Control Panel\International-Temp" /f >nul
reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v sShortDate /d "yyyy-MM-dd" /f >nul
reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v sTimeFormat /d "HH:mm:ss" /f >nul

set dd=%date:~8,2%
set mm=%date:~5,2%
set yyyy=%date:~0,4%
call :days
set /a today=!days!

FOR %%A IN (*.*) DO (
  set tf=%%~tA
  set fd=!tf:~0,10!
  set dd=!fd:~8,2!
  set mm=!fd:~5,2!
  set yyyy=!fd:~0,4!
  call :days
  set /a age= !today!-!days!
  if !age! leq 2 (
    echo  %%A is !age! days old
  )
)
reg copy "HKCU\Control Panel\International-Temp" "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /f >nul
goto :eof

:days
:: Algorithm based on Fliegel-Van Flandern algorithm from the Astronomical Almanac,
:: provided by Doctor Fenton on the Math Forum (http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/51907.html),
:: and converted to batch code by Ron Bakowski.
SET /A Month1 = ( 1%MM% %% 100 - 14 ) / 12
SET /A Year1  = %YYYY% + 4800
SET /A days = 1461 * ( %Year1% + %Month1% ) / 4 + 367 * ( (1%MM% %% 100) - 2 -12 * %Month1% ) / 12 - ( 3 * ( ( %Year1% + %Month1% + 100 ) / 100 ) ) / 4 + (1%DD% %% 100) - 32075
SET Month1=
SET Year1=
goto :eof

Answer 3

here is the reference of how you can delete files older than 2 days

following command on cmd will do it.

forfiles  /p "c:\path" /s /m *.* /d -365 /c "cmd /c del @file"