Just an fyi, you should try to avoid the practice of having a space before and after the > of a redirection. In certain circumstances, it can alter or invalidate what you are trying to do.
Also, using ">NUL 2>&1" instead of ">NUL"will nullify error condition output as well as normal output. This can be benefitial when you dont care to see the verbose error msg when you are also trapping the %ERRORLEVEL%, etc, or performing a function that has no concern for such output. -- ME2 On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 3:25 PM, Ben Scott <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 1:44 PM, m b <[email protected]> wrote: >> I need to create a section of a batch file that will determine whether a >> folder has had files added to it or not, and then perform one of two >> actions. > > If you're just looking to see if the folder is empty or not, this may help: > > DIR /B %folder% | findstr /R . > NUL > > That will return success if %folder% is empty, or failure if %folder% > contains anything at all. ("Success" being a zero exit code (error > level), and "failure" being a non-zero exit code.) > > If you're actually looking to at directory contents changes, then > yah, you'll need to save previous directory state and compare, like > you spoke of. > >> the "fc" command doesn't seem to give me any output I can use within the >> batch file > > ??? If my testing, FC.EXE returns success if files are identical, > and failure if they differ. Win XP Pro SP2. Demonstration batch > file: > > FC orig.txt same.txt > NUL > @ECHO ERRORLEVEL=%ERRORLEVEL% > FC orig.txt diff.txt > NUL > @ECHO ERRORLEVEL=%ERRORLEVEL% > > That produces this output: > > Ben>FC orig.txt same.txt 1>NUL > ERRORLEVEL=0 > > Ben>FC orig.txt diff.txt 1>NUL > ERRORLEVEL=1 > > -- Ben > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ > ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
