Hi,

I have a bunch of text files that I want to write new text to, but I want to clear (delete) content first. I've been studying how to do this and I found a couple of different ways to accomplish this, a batch script way and a bash script way. I would like to do it both ways, but for now, I want to accomplish this via a batch file for the simplicity to understand. How could I do this so the batch file will loop through a couple of different hard drives ( C and D ) to zero out the contents of the text files?

Note: I don't want to delete the files, just the contents of the file so I can re-write new text into the files.

I am pretty stumped on this and need a quick solution.

Thanks for your help in advance!
-Brian

echo "" >$filename

But generally speaking when a script opens a file in write mode, you have the option to write to the end (append mode), or start over writing from the beginning. So normally you don't need to clear the file first.

Thank you for the information about appending new data to the old files...That's sounds more like what I am trying to do, but I have to try it out first. Can you show an example how to run a for loop to iterate this process over a couple of different drives while recursing into sub-directories as well?

I could put copy all the files onto one drive and run that code, but being that they are in different folders across a couple of drives, but that will defeat the purpose of my goal.

I've tried this which seems to do part of the job, but getting it to loop (iterate) through a couple of drives won't work for some reason

Must be tired-ness catching up with me.

 pushd %*
for /r %%j in (*.txt) do if /I not "%%j"=="%~nx0" type nul > "%%j"
popd

I know the iteration part works like this:

 @for %%d in (C D) do something

but the above code, is not playing nice with me tonight... Anyone care to take a shot at getting it?

Thanks everyone!

How would it be possible to do a nested loop here?

for /r %%g in (C D) do command

to iterate through a couple of drives...

and the command below to write zeros to the text files? Another words, Nest both codes together? Can someone enlighten me here?

@echo off
pushd %*
for /r %%j in (*.txt) do if /I not "%%j"=="%~nx0" type nul > "%%j"
popd

Hope this explains the situation a bit better.

Btw, I'd rather clear the file first, because the data that is to be re written, will be *ALL* fresh as I was told. nothing will be appended, just added as fresh content.

Thanks!

Anyone?