Have you ever needed to move only certain files out of a directory, based on their last modified date? Or have you wanted to move all the files out of a given directory, except for the latest three? If so, then you've finally got a utility to do just that (a not much else)!

AnalogX NewMove is about as straight-forward as any command line utility ever is; from the command prompt you can type the name by itself to get a list of options:

F:\tools\newmove> newmove

AnalogX NewMove version 1.01 (Release)
The latest version can always be found at http://www.analogx.com/

Usage:   NEWMOVE [options]
Options:   /TARGET [path]      Destination for files
           /SOURCE [path]      Source for files (def: current)
           /COUNT [number]     Number of files to leave (def: 1)
           /JUSTCOPY           Copies the files (does not move)
           /MOVEOLD            Move older files first (default)
           /MOVENEW            Move newer files first
           /DELETE             Don't move or copy, just delete
           /TEST               Nothing actually changes

Here's a brief description of each option:

    TARGET      This is the path where you want the files to be copied to.  It
                supports both relative (..\) paths or literal paths (C:\).  I
                would recommend using literal whenever possible to eliminate
                any possible ambiguity, unless you are comfortable with using
                relative paths.
    SOURCE      This is the directory it is going to be working in.  If no
                source directory is specified, then it will use the current
                mounted path.
    COUNT       This is the number of files to actually leave, so if you told
                it to move newer files first, with a count of 5, it would leave
                the five OLDEST files.  In contrast, if it was set to move the
                older files first, it would leave the five NEWEST files.
    JUSTCOPY    Use the COPY command instead of MOVE, leaving the source files
                intact where they are.  By default the program uses MOVE.
    MOVEOLD     This specifies the order in which files are copied; the
                directory is sorted with the older files first, and it copies
                from older moving towards newer.
    MOVENEW     Exactly the same as MOVEOLD, except the files are sorted with
                newer files first, and it copies from newer moving towards
                older.
    DELETE      Instead of actually copying or moving files, the program will
                delete them.
    TEST        If you're unsure of how things will happen, you can always
                specify test, and it will report everything it would have
                normally done, but without actually doing any of it.

Pretty simple, eh? So here is a quick example of one of the more common uses of this utility.

Let's say you have a directory which stores log files for something like IIS (set to create a new file each day), and you perform analysis using Analog of the last week (7 days) of activity. Now, you don't want Analog to process the log files for anything prior to 7 days (sure, you can set this in Analog's config file, but it still reads through the log files, which takes time). Here's the command to tell it to move anything that's older than 7 days:

NEWMOVE /TARGET C:\logs\archive /COUNT 7 /MOVEOLD

This assumes it's executed in the directory where the logs exist, it then reads the directory, sorts it with the older files first, and moves all but 7 files into the directory C:\logs\archive.