My answer on Symbol equivalent to NEQ, LSS, GTR, etc. in Windows batch files explains in detail how a string comparison is done by command IF which includes the surrounding " on comparing the strings. Therefore the condition if !firstChar! == "_" is never true as the string on left side is always just one character never starting with " while the string on right side has three characters.
I suggest for this task:
@echo off
setlocal EnableExtensions DisableDelayedExpansion
for /F "delims=" %%I in ('dir "D:\Jaye\Programming\Web\Project\scss\*.scss" /A-D /B /S 2^>nul ^| %SystemRoot%\System32\findstr.exe /R /V "\\_[^\\]*$"') do (
rem Do something with file name assigned to loop variable I.
echo File to process is: "%%I"
)
endlocal
The command FOR starts in background one more command process with %ComSpec% /c and the command line within ' appended as additional arguments. So executed in background is with Windows installed to C:\Windows:
C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c dir "D:\Jaye\Programming\Web\Project\scss\*.scss" /A-D /B /S 2>nul | %SystemRoot%\System32\findstr.exe /R /V "\\_[^\\]*$"
The command DIR searches
- in specified directory
D:\Jaye\Programming\Web\Project\scss
- and all its subdirectories because of option
/S
- for files because of option
/A-D (attribute not directory)
- matching the wildcard pattern
*.scss and
- outputs the found file names in bare format because of option
/B which means with just file name and file extension and with full path because of option /S.
The file names output by DIR are redirected to FINDSTR which searches with a regular expression for lines having an underscore after last backslash character which means at beginning of the file name and outputs the inverted result, i.e. all lines of which file name does not start with an underscore.
The error message output by DIR to handle STDERR on finding no file matching the search criteria is suppressed by redirecting it with 2>nul to device NUL.
Read the Microsoft documentation about Using command redirection operators for an explanation of 2>nul and |. The redirection operators > and | must be escaped with caret character ^ on FOR command line to be interpreted as literal characters when Windows command interpreter processes this command line before executing command FOR which executes the embedded command line with using a separate command process started in background.
The command FOR with option /F captures output written to handle STDOUT of started background command process and processes the captured output line by line after started cmd.exe terminated itself.
Empty lines are ignored always by FOR which do not occur here. All other lines are split up by default into substrings using normal space and horizontal tab as delimiter. This line splitting behavior is not wanted here because there could be *.scss files with a space in file name. For that reason the option delims= is used to define an empty list of delimiters which disables line splitting behavior.
FOR with option /F would also ignore lines on which first substring after line splitting is starting with a semicolon because of ; is the default end of line character. A file name can start with a semicolon. But DIR outputs in this case the file names always with full path and so it is not possible that any full qualified file name starts with a semicolon. So the default eol=; can be kept in this case.
The advantage of this solution is that *.scss files containing usually one or more ! are processed also correct because of delayed environment variable expansion is not needed here. FINDSTR makes the file name filtering.
To understand the commands used and how they work, open a command prompt window, execute there the following commands, and read the displayed help pages for each command, entirely and carefully.
dir /?echo /?endlocal /?findstr /?for /?rem /?setlocal /?
