'File name pattern matching in Windows command line

I have several files like:

a.txt
a$.txt
a$b.txt
b.txt
b$.txt
b$c.txt

I would like to print file whose name does not contain '$' using Windows command line for file name pattern matching like regular expression:

for %%f in ([^$]+.txt) do type %%f

or

for %%f in ([a-zA-Z]+.txt) do type %%f

But it does not work. How can I do this using Windows command line? Thanks!

windowsfor-loopbatch-filecmd


Solution 1:[1]

The for loop, like almost all cmd commands, does not support something like regular expressions. The only command that supports a tiny excerpt of those is findstr, which can be used together with dir to get the desired result:

@echo off
for /F "delims= eol=|" %%f in ('
    dir /B /A:-D "*.txt" ^| findstr "^[^$][^$]*\.txt$"
') do (
    >&2 echo/%%f
    type "%%f"
)

This could even be simplified by replacing the portion findstr "^[^$][^$]*\.txt$" with find/V "$".

Solution 2:[2]

As 'Windows command line' includes powershell.exe as well as cmd.exe, I thought I'd offer a based idea too.

Directly in :

Get-Content -Path 'C:\Users\Xiagao\Desktop\*.txt' -Exclude '*$*.txt'

In /, but leveraging :

PowerShell -NoP "GC 'C:\Users\Xiagao\Desktop\*.txt' -Ex '*$*.txt'"

You would obviously modify the path to your source files location, (use .\*.txt for the current directory).

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1
Solution 2 Compo

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