Where Windows Command? Yes, Right Here!
What Is Where?
Where is a command in Windows as the name implies tells you where files are located based on the drive or folder you specify to look at.
This can be useful for finding a specifc file or putting in “*” or “?” as part of a wildcard search. This program woks best in command prompt as running it in powershell just spits out errors when you attempt to run where.
Here are the switches you can use with this command:
- /R - Recursive search
- /Q = Quiet mode
- This will not return anything on the console, instead it’ll either dump a 0 (If the search was successful in finding anything against the search criteria) or a 1 (If the search was unsuccessful in finding anything against the search criteria) to %errorlevel%.
- you can just type
echo %errorlevel%in a command prompt to get the code.
- /F = Displays the files in double quotes
- /T = Displays the file size and last modified time for the matching file(s)
Heres an example of how to run this, say we want to look at the D:\ drive and search if any files ending in HTML exist:
where /r d:\ *.html
Where vs Dir /S /B|Find /I “Whatever String”
Now you are probably saying whats the difference between the two? from a functionality perspective its the same, but using fewer commands can make your code a bit cleaner if you can use just one command vs two if not more just to perform the same task.