Add Attribute and merge .shp's from multiple folders/directories

Question

I would like to run a process to:

1) find all shapefiles in muliple folders/directories (i.e., the directory for each differen folder is "G:\Projects\"variable project #"\GIS\Shapefiles)

2) Add a field for inserting "variable project #" from the file path name(i.e., truncate the file path name to only include "variable project #")

3)Then export and merge these features into a temporary folder.

...if I could even do stpes 1-2 above, it would be a tremendous help. This files are in a couple hundred folders and, due to the length of the file path, it is a bit onerous to try to batch process these manually...

Any help would be greatly apprecited,

Thanks!

Answer 1

I would suggest FME from Safe for this kind of job. If you dont have a license you can download the demo version. Else you could use python or anything to script what you want.