Finding corrupt files on my work's shared drive?

[Simcut]

Hi guys,

Require your help please, at my work most of the team (that's 60/70 people strong) use a shared drive on a network and there's a small amount of space at the moment.

One of the reasons for this, which is a regular occurence is there are some bizarre files that keep appearing in various folders on the Shared Drive, for example my folder on the shared drive has a few files such as:

00af7000
90837000
9c898000
C43a3000

These files do not have any extension (no .xls or anything) and these are scattered all over the shared drive, god knows how much space they are taking up, I gather these are corrupted excel documents or ones that failed to save properly.

My question is, how can I search through the Shared Drive (totalling 4gb) just for these type of files mentioned above? we are very low on disk space and I need to sort it out.

Hope you guys can help.

Cheers,

[altis]

You can list all files in the current directory with no extension using the DOS command "dir *." (without the quotes). Unfortunately, most directory names also have no extension so it'll list those too. You can list files in all directories by going to the root and using the same command with the switch "/s". Finally, you can redirect the output to another file adding "> filename.ext". HTH.

[Paddy1]

Your filenames are all hex numbers and so can only start with 0-9 or a-f and are always 8 characters long. You can make use of this.

Save the following to a file called filelist.bat in the root of your drive.

dir /s /b 0???????.* > kill.bat
dir /s /b 1???????.* >> kill.bat
dir /s /b 2???????.* >> kill.bat
dir /s /b 3???????.* >> kill.bat
dir /s /b 4???????.* >> kill.bat
dir /s /b 5???????.* >> kill.bat
dir /s /b 6???????.* >> kill.bat
dir /s /b 7???????.* >> kill.bat
dir /s /b 8???????.* >> kill.bat
dir /s /b 9???????.* >> kill.bat
dir /s /b a???????.* >> kill.bat
dir /s /b b???????.* >> kill.bat
dir /s /b c???????.* >> kill.bat
dir /s /b d???????.* >> kill.bat
dir /s /b e???????.* >> kill.bat
dir /s /b f???????.* >> kill.bat

Open a dos prompt, go to the root of your drive and type

@filelist

Then edit kill.bat to remove any files you want to keep. Add "del " without the quotes to the start of each line and save the file.

Then type @kill to execute the batch file. This will delete the filenames that you left in the file.