Batch File Automation Part - 3

Archive Files Using Automation

Let me discuss on a new requirement that was in my project. The requirement is as follows.

1. A particular directory would have a number of text files with different names but they all have a similar prefixes.

2. The number of files are too many which would make manual work tedious and time consuming.

3. The files must be archived to the Archive file and they should be having a time stamp appended in the file name.

4. The appended time stamp should not be the archived date but the file created date. So that this helps in checking the date  which the file was created.

5. Once the files are archived they would be deleted form the source directory.

The requirement is very simple and a VB script would be doing the entire process with few lines in it.

Consider the folder structure E:\Test\ and E:\Test\Archive.

E:\Test\ folder would have 10 files namely Text_1.txt, Text_2.txt, Text_3.txt, Text_4.txt, Text_5.txt, Text_5.txt, Text_7.txt, Text_8.txt, Text_9.txt, Text_10.txt.

All these 10 files in folder E:\Test\ to be archived to E:\Test\Archive. 

Here is a sample VB Script which would do satisfy the above requirement.

strComputer = "." ' Comuter Name

strDrive = "e:" ' Drive Letter

strPath = "Test" 'Directory Name

desName = strDrive & "\" & strPath & "\Archive\" 'Complete path of Target Directory

Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer)

Set objF = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

Set colFiles = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from CIM_DataFile where Drive = '" & _

strDrive & "' AND Path = '\\" & strPath & "\\' AND FileName Like 'Test%' AND Extension = 'txt'") ' this would fetch a cursor like in PLSQL with all the matches

For Each objFile In colFiles

objF.CopyFile objFile.Name, (desName & objFile.Filename & "_" & _

Left(objFile.CreationDate, Len(objFile.CreationDate) - 11) & "." & objFile.Extension)  'Move each file and rename it to archived directory

Next

Save the above code snippet in a file by name Archive.vbs and then call the vbs file from bat file. I would call my bat file Archive.bat. This bat file would have following line

@echo off
Start Archive.vbs

The bat file would call the vbs and archive all the files as required.

How ever the above code would be specific only to a specific structure. We wuld be discusing how this can be generalized to any folder structure.

Stay Tuned.......