recursion - Windows Batch File Looping Through Directories to Process Files?

Question

I need to write/use a batch file that processes some imagery for me.

I have one folder full of nested folders, inside each of these nested folders is one more folder that contains a number of TIF images, the number of images vary in each folder. I also have a batch file, lets call it ProcessImages.bat for Windows that you can "drop" these TIF files on (or obviously specify them in a command line list when invoking the bat); upon which it creates a new folder with all my images process based on an EXE that I have.

The good thing is that because the bat file uses the path from the folders you "drop" onto it, I can select all the TIFs of one folder and drop it to do the processing... but as I continue to manually do this for the 300 or so folders of TIFs I have I find it bogs my system down so unbelievably and if I could only process these one at a time (without manually doing it) it would be wonderful.

All that said... could someone point me in the right direction (for a Windows bat file AMATEUR) in a way I can write a Windows bat script that I can call from inside a directory and have it traverse through ALL the directories contained inside that directory... and run my processing batch file on each set of images one at a time?

Answer 1

You may write a recursive algorithm in Batch that gives you exact control of what you do in every nested subdirectory:

@echo off
call :treeProcess
goto :eof

:treeProcess
rem Do whatever you want here over the files of this subdir, for example:
for %%f in (*.tif) do echo %%f
for /D %%d in (*) do (
    cd %%d
    call :treeProcess
    cd ..
)
exit /b