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I have a folder including sub-folders in my Windows PC where I have multiple files of images with different dimensions with standard formatted names as shown below.

  • first-image-name.jpg
  • first-image-name-72x72.jpg
  • first-image-name-150x150.jpg
  • first-image-name-250x250.jpg
  • first-image-name-300x300.jpg
  • first-image-name-400x400.jpg
  • first-image-name-1024x1024.jpg
  • second-image-name.png
  • second-image-name-72x72.png
  • second-image-name-150x150.png
  • second-image-name-250x250.png
  • second-image-name-300x300.png
  • second-image-name-400x400.png
  • second-image-name-1024x1024.png

Now I want to delete all those image files that are of different sizes as shown in their name and should leave the original one only.

For that, I tried many queries as shared below but non of these are working...

Windows PowerShell:

Get-ChildItem $Path | Where{$_.Name -Match '.*[0-9]+x[0-9]+.\(jpg\|png\|jpeg\)$'} | Remove-Item

Windows CMD:

find -type f -regex '.*[0-9]+x[0-9]+.\(jpg\|png\|jpeg\)$' -delete

find -name '.*[0-9]+x[0-9]+.\(jpg\|png\|jpeg\)$' -delete

None of the above is working so let me know what I am doing wrong...??? Please remember I have to use it as recursive as I have many folders inside the main folder too.

Muhammad Hassan
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    You can try it without escaping the parenthesis for the grouping and the pipe for the alternation in powershell `.*[0-9]x[0-9]+.(jpe?g|png)$` – The fourth bird Nov 27 '22 at 15:34

1 Answers1

2

The fourth bird has provided the crucial pointer in a comment:

  • You mistakenly \-escaped the following regex metacharacters in your regex, which causes them to be matched as literals: (, ), and |. Simply omitting the \ would work.

  • Conversely, you neglected to escape . as \., given that you want it to be interpreted literally.

However, I suggest the following optimization, which pre-filters the files of interest and then matches only against each pre-filtered file's base name (.BaseName), i.e. the name without its extension:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse $Path -Include *.jpg, *.jpeg, *.png |
  Where-Object { $_.BaseName -match '-[0-9]+x[0-9]+$' } |
  Remove-Item -WhatIf

Note: The -WhatIf common parameter in the command above previews the operation. Remove -WhatIf once you're sure the operation will do what you want.

Note:

  • The regex above needs no .* prefix, given that PowerShell's -match operator looks for substrings by default.

    • Using character class \d in lieu of [0-9] is an option, although \d technically also matches digits other than the ASCII-range characters 0 through 9, namely anything that the Unicode standard classifies as a digit.

  • While use of -Include, which (unlike -Filter) conveniently allows you to specify multiple PowerShell wildcard patterns, works as expected in combination with -Recurse, in the absence of -Recurse its behavior is counterintuitive:

mklement0
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