Is there a utility that will recurse a command down through subfolders?

[Lolipop Jones]

Back in the old DOS days (I used DR-DOS) there was a neat command called "xall" which worked like this:

xall copy *.m3u E:\   
(from the starting point, drill down through all subdirs, find anything with the m3u extension and copy to the root of E drive)

xall ren *.txt *.prn 
(do the rename operation all the way down the subdir path)

Xall is still out there on the 'net, but all I can find is a version that's long-filename-unfriendly.

Anyone know of a Windows version of this?  GUI or command line, either would be great.

LJ

[rjbull]

Warning : I have not tried this, but you could look at Brian Friesen's SWEEP32.  Go to his Freezerware DOS utilities page and page down until you get to SWEEP.  He lists compatibility here and the table implies that SWEEP32 should be compatible with LFNs.

You might also try Googling "global" and/or "sweep" with "command line utilities."

[mwb1100]

If you want to muck around with some of the advanced capabilities of NT's cmd.exe command processor, you can do this with a batch file:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/05/11/2532913.aspx

[mouser]

cough cough.. my Drag+Drop Robot program was designed for stuff like this:
http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/dragdrop/index.html

[rjbull]

If you have pre-existing batch files, and/or are a member of the galaxy's Elder Race from Planet DOS and think like that, then an updated xall/sweep/global would probably be the best route.  Besides, that method gives you full automation.

@Mouser:
Mouser, from your video, D&DR looks a hybrid.  Users have to know and understand command lines to use it, and some command line switches can be very complex, including archiver ones.  Yet, using D&DR is interactive.  Looks to me like it's most useful for complex tasks that you do regularly but infrequently.  Have you thought of making D&DR fully automated by adding command-line support?  Users could specify a particular configuration, which would include the files to be worked on.  Then you could call D&DR from e.g. a scheduler.

[mouser]

rjbull -- i suppose i could support something like that, but let's remember that the real advantage of D&DR is that it gives a commandline tool a *slightly* easier interface and drag+drop batch support.

one thing i have considered is adding a kind of gui scripting function so that someone could make a nicer gui with specific options for a specific program, and use that as a configuration.  so that the commandline options for a specific program would be shown in a friendly way, compared to the way it is now which is that you have to know the commandline syntax.

however, this is one of my least popular programs (even though i think it's one of the more unique and useful for commandline phobics like me), so it's not exactly high on my priority list.