I’ve been out on a client site for a month or two and haven’t had time to update a lot. Now that I’m back in the office I decided to ease myself into things slowly by going through my usual backup routine and incidentally tidying up my music collection.

I had discovered over the last few months that bits of my collection disappeared when I imported into iTunes, because they were originally ripped into ogg vorbis format – iTunes doesn’t understand ogg (at least, not by default), and because I’ve got around 23GB of music, I hadn’t noticed a few hundred missing songs until now.

Converting them in place was fairly simple with CDex, but once I’d done this I needed to move, check, then delete the (now) extraneous ogg files. So, what command could I issue to search through a list of directories, find files of a particular extension and move them to a holding pen? This isn’t especially straight forward on the windows command line, but this is the batch file that eventually worked for me :

@echo off
if exist oggfile.list del oggfile.list
dir /s /b *.ogg >> oggfile.list
for /f "delims=" %%a in (oggfile.list) do (move "%%a" temp)

You can issue these as separate commands if you want, all that changes is the “%%a” becomes “%a” instead (I did it that way myself to begin with until I realised I wanted to find other, errant non-mp3 files as well).

If you want something more generic, being able to pass arguments to batch scripts means you can do this with files of any particular extension :

@echo off
if "%1"=="" goto :EOF
echo Finding and moving .%1 files...
if exist %1file.list del %1file.list
dir /s /b *.%1 >> %1file.list
for /f "delims=" %%a in (%1file.list) do (move "%%a" temp)

Assuming you save this as finder.bat (there already is a find command), then to move all ogg files in a particular tree you would simply call :

C:\finder ogg

I could probably go the whole hog and make the “temp” directory user-definable as well, but I think I’ve used the script a grand total of 3 times now and probably won’t touch it again.

It was fun to go old-school for a while. Dos batch commands are a lot more powerful than people realise, but they are somewhat arcane.

I recommend Rob van der Woude’s scripting pages for anyone wanting to delve into this more deeply, I’ve used his reference pages quite a lot in the past and usually been able to solve the problem at hand. He also covers a lot of other scripting languages besides windows batch script.