Batch file that deletes folders from My Documents except those in an array

Question

I'm absolutely positively sick of random junk folders (CyberPower, VirtualBox, etc) being dumped in to the My Documents folder in Windows. I'm using Windows 7 for clarification. No, it's not the "users file" it's My Documents, I'm also not going to call the Xbox 3 the wrong number. Now that we've clarified that I'd like to figure out a way to make a small batch program that will decimate unknown junk folders and then I'll stick it in the one place I actively allow programs to be run at startup: the startup folder in the all-users folder.

If arrays (or this in general) can not be done via a batch what would be a good platform neutral language to use to approach this problem?

Answer 1

First, a caution. An incomplete whitelist may cause deletion of important files. Furthermore, these 'junk folders' are often required for the correct operation of software that created them. If you still opt for this solution, here's a one-liner, with line breaks for readability:

pushd C:\Users\John\Documents && 
  for /D %i in (*) do @(
    echo %i| findstr /V /I /R /C:"^Important$" /C:"^Keep me$" > NUL &&
    echo rmdir /S /Q %i
  ) & popd

In its current form, this statement does not do anything harmful. The second echo displays, rather than executes the 'rmdir' command and is included as a precaution. Check whether the script would work as intended, then remove the second occurence of 'echo'.

A brief explenation. pushd temporarily changes directory to the documents folder. for /D lists all directories in there. For each directory, findstr matches its name against the whitelist. The switches /V /I /R print only non-matching entries, make the search case-insensitive and enable regular expressions. Every directory that is to be kept is then listed as /C:"^dirname$". Directories not on the whitelist will make findstr return errorlevel zero, thus executing the command after the double ampersands, i.e. rmdir /S /Q %i, deleting that directory, empty or not, without asking for confirmation.

If run from a batch file instead of directly from the command line, replace every %i with %%i.