FINDSTR fails when the search string includes a minus character

user_1266461 0
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I'm going through all JS files recursively and minifying them. However I have to leave some JS files intact.

I've had a lot of success using a combination of for, dir and findstr. But when I wanted to ignore already minified files (files ending with "-min.js") the FINDSTR command broke.

This is the command I've used:

for /f %i in ('dir /b /a-d /s "D:\update" ^| findstr /liv "\admin" ^| findstr /ile ".js" ^| findstr /vile "-min.js" ^| findstr /vile ".min.js"') do echo %i

With the following errors:

FINDSTR: /. ignored
FINDSTR: /j ignored
FINDSTR: Bad command line
FINDSTR: Write error
FINDSTR: Write error
FINDSTR: Write error
FINDSTR: Write error

The problem is surely with the findstr /vile "-min.js" clause however I don't know why hyphen is causing a problem since I'm using the /l (literal) flag.

windows-8.1 batch-file command-line
2 Answers

An alternative to using escape characters or /c:, I've found findstr also cooperates with leading dashes if you include at least 1 space as prefix (doesn't affect the matches when not searching literally). 

findstr /vile " -min.js"
user_35558830
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