Simulating Wildcards (68268)


The information in this article applies to:

  • Microsoft MS-DOS operating system 3.1
  • Microsoft MS-DOS operating system 3.2
  • Microsoft MS-DOS operating system 3.21
  • Microsoft MS-DOS operating system 3.3
  • Microsoft MS-DOS operating system 3.3a
  • Microsoft MS-DOS operating system 4.0
  • Microsoft MS-DOS operating system 4.01
  • Microsoft MS-DOS operating system 5.0
  • Microsoft MS-DOS operating system 5.0a
  • Microsoft MS-DOS operating system 6.0
  • Microsoft MS-DOS operating system 6.2
  • Microsoft MS-DOS operating system 6.21
  • Microsoft MS-DOS operating system 6.22
This article was previously published under Q68268

SUMMARY

You can simulate wildcards with the FOR command for those commands in MS-DOS that do not allow wildcards. The structure of the command is as follows 
   for %p in (set) do (command) %p
where %p is a variable used by the FOR command, (set) is a set of filenames that command will be applied to, and command is the command to be carried out. For example: 
   for %p in (*.txt) do type %p

-or- 

   for %p in (*.txt) do find "CONFIG" %p

MORE INFORMATION

You may want to create a batch file for this command because it will be much shorter. However, unlike the command-line version of the FOR command, the batch-file version uses two percent signs (%). The following are two batch-file examples: 
   for %%p in (%1) do type %%p

-or- 

   for %%p in (%1) do find "%2" %%p
Using the second batch-file example, the following command typed at the MS-DOS prompt finds every file ending with the .TXT extension that has the string "CONFIG" in it. The quotation marks ("%2") are specific to the FIND command and not necessarily part of the FOR command syntax. If the second example is in a batch file called FF.BAT, to invoking the batch-file command, type: 
   ff *.txt CONFIG"
Modification Type:MajorLast Reviewed:5/12/2003
Keywords:KB68268
©2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.