vbscript delete folder containing multiple files with progress bar

3
votes

was hoping their might be a way to visualize progress of the deletion of several files, I have an application that runs a cleanup when it's done, the directory it deletes is almost 3GB, so it would be nice to have a progress bar popup similar to the one that shows if you use the 

Const FOF_CREATEPROGRESSDLG = &H0&

strTargetFolder = "C:\OfficeTemp" 

Set oShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
Set objFolder = oShell.NameSpace(strTargetFolder) 

objFolder.CopyHere "OfficeTemp\*.*", FOF_CREATEPROGRESSDLG

supposedly you can implement this with SHFileOperation, but I only see examples for using this in C++, anyone ever done this with VBScript?

C++ Win32 API Delete file with progress bar

2
vbscript
Yes, SHFileOperation will do this, but that's a native Win32 function, which cannot be called directly from VBScript. You'll have to find an alternative method, such as WMI. I have no idea if such a method exists. - Cody Gray

2 Answers

1
votes

My advise is don't do it if you want to keep yout script agile. It's not the size in GB that takes long to delete, so for a couple of large files it's not suitable since before you get up your gui up and running and display some progress your filedelition allready could be done. You culd just show the filename as it is being deleted.

If it are many many small files that take longer the progress bar would be more suitable, only you need to do it in IE or another browser that you can script to and the result will never be very reliable nor beautifull. I've seen ActiveX objects that give such progress bar but even when you could use these you have problems. You need to know in advance how many files there are to be deleted and the divide the process in small steps and show the progress as a percentage of the total. This alone could take as long as the deletion itself, vbscript is very slow in handling files. Showing the files here would certainly slow down the process, you could show something like

1000 files deleted.. 2000 files deleted..

so that the user knows there is something happening. The fastest way do delete the map is by shelling out en let de OS take care of it, then wait for the process to end and resume the script from there.

For some of these aproaches i have samples, sorry that i can't give you and easy allproblemssolved answer.

0
votes

For people on the look for a progressbar while copying, i found this in meanwhile, tested and working on Win7

Const FOF_CREATEPROGRESSDLG = &H0&

strTargetFolder = "D:\Scripts" 

Set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
Set objFolder = objShell.NameSpace(strTargetFolder) 

objFolder.CopyHere "C:\Scripts\*.*", FOF_CREATEPROGRESSDLG