Simple DOS command-line to ignore data on a line after the last backslash

Question

I'm creating a batch file to make multiple directories from a list in a text file however after the directory is listed sometimes a filename is as well. Is there an easy way to have it ignore all data after the last \ on a line?

Answer 1

I might suggest that DOS batch isn't the right tool for this job, because it doesn't have built-in facilities for string manipulation like this would need.

If you have Perl available, you can do something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

while (<>) {
    s/\\[^\\]*$//; # this removes a the last backslash and anything after it
    mkdir $_;
}

Answer 2

You can use something like this:

@echo off
set filename="c:\temp\my files\file.txt"
for /f "tokens=*" %i in ("%filename%") do set filename="%~dpi"
echo %filename%

The result will be "c:\temp\my files\".